Tomer Tishgarten is vice president of technology at Engauge, one of the nation’s largest independent advertising agencies. Follow him @tomerific.
If you’re among the many marketers trying to grasp the game-changing impact of Xbox’s motion-controlled add-on Kinect, you’re not alone. Even Microsoft didn’t realize what it had on its hands. When launching in November, Microsoft predicted sales of 3 million units by the end of 2010. Instead, the company sold 8 million in two months and recently entered the Guinness Book of World Records as the fastest-selling consumer electronics product in history. For brands, the excitement is just beginning — and so are the challenges.
In addition to sensing motion, Microsoft’s newest periphery for the Xbox 360 recognizes voices, captures facial expressions in real time, and can even tell players apart. It’s arguably the biggest advance in mainstream digital interface design since the widespread adoption of the computer mouse in the ’80s.
Kinect and its underlying PrimeSense technology promise to open new doors and could explode our conceptions of what’s possible online. Today’s online world remains governed by the conventions of preset hyperlinks and point-and-click devices, but over time, those constraints will be shattered. The popularity of touchscreens on smartphones and tablets suggest we were already headed in this direction. Marketers may play an important role in determining how quickly Kinect technology crosses the chasm from hardcore gamers to mainstream adoption.
The Engagement Potential for Brands
Big brands, including Burger King and Samsung, jumped in first with Kinect gaming promotions. But the marketing potential of Kinect extends far beyond video games. In the near term, marketers could leverage Kinect technology to create eye-opening trade show displays and in-store promotions. Freed from the gaming console, the technology can draw people into an immersive, interactive experience.
Innovative web-based applications will also be worth considering as the technology reaches a critical mass of 15% of households or users, a point at which adoption rates tend to accelerate.
With Avatar Kinect, Microsoft will soon move into augmented social media. Microsoft’s plans for the new technology clearly go beyond gaming. And Kinect’s controller-free environment should appeal to casual gamers, not just the hardcore console jocks, which will heighten appeal for mass marketers. Indeed, the pitch to advertisers from Microsoft is that women, younger children and tweens are “joining in the fun” with Kinect. Most importantly, perhaps, the price is relatively inexpensive; approximately $150.
In the future, it’s conceivable that consumers scanned into the system could theoretically interact with three-dimensional models of products. Why couldn’t Ford, which recently launched an exclusive Xbox campaign for its C-MAX, put consumers behind the wheel and let them take the newest model for a spin?
For catalog clothing brands, the ecommerce implications are immense. Why couldn’t Eddie Bauer let consumers try on clothes virtually? In the travel industry, the applications are even more numerous — a walking tour of the cabanas at Club Med, anyone? And with the capacity to scan an entire room, why couldn’t The Home Depot let customers design the layout of new kitchen cabinets or Ikea showcase sofas within digital models of consumers’ living rooms?
Peak Expectations Meet Practical Challenges
Marketers have tremendous opportunities to differentiate themselves from their competitors in this new environment. Yet they also face the challenge of developing those experiences without instructions or precedents.
Before agencies and developers can create the architecture of this new world — and customized applications for brands — they must first study what makes the new technology tick, which is why developers have been so busy “hacking” Kinect.
The development tools for Kinect are still fairly immature at this stage, but they do provide enough capabilities to build some interesting applications. As more work is done to support these tools by Microsoft and the larger development community, the possibilities for Kinect will grow exponentially.
Interested in more Business resources? Check out Mashable Explore, a new way to discover information on your favorite Mashable topics.
My nephew’s wife was frustrated. The “easy-to-use” site-builder software she was using to make the church camp website with was anything but. To make matters worse, their “free” hosting service came with a price—banner ads that randomly appeared on the site. And she found no help on the home front … unlike so many of the nephews out there that have built websites for their uncle’s business, mine was not one of them.
So in desperation, she turned to her Facebook friends to ask if anyone knew of a free and easy-to-use website builder—one without ads. A well-meaning friend replied:
That is so last decade. Why don’t you just make a Facebook fan page? It’s 2011; you gotta catch up with the times!
She even offered to set the page up for her.
Her thinking was reflected in a 2010 WIRED article entitled, The Web Is Dead. Long Live the Internet. The author makes the point that, the more we access the Internet using our smart phones, iPads, and gaming devices, the less we are using the Web or visiting websites. Is the rise of the app causing the decline the website? Welcome to Web 3.0.
You may or may not agree with the author, but here’s my point: Don’t assume the stuff you sell today will be the same stuff you sell tomorrow. When I quit my web business in early 2006, “social media marketing” was barely a blip on the radar. But if you believe the blogosphere, it’s now the Next Big Thing.
To paraphrase author Michael Gerber, the technical person (read, web designer / developer / SEO expert) looks inward at his skills and asks, “How can I sell this?” But the Entrepreneur looks out at the needs of the market and asks, “How can I fulfill this?” So let me rephrase my question. What will you do for a living when the Web as we know it is dead? What will you do when your skills no longer fit the needs of the market? Will you end up like the thousands of unemployed U.S. steel workers? Or like the ice harvesters of the 19th Century?
The Internet as we know it is going to be forever changed—if Facebook has their way, that is. In case you missed the memo, Facebook and Google are locked in a near-epic struggle over who will ultimately control the Internet and its content.
Another WIRED article describes “Facebook’s 4-Step Plan of Online Domination.” It starts with 200+ million Facebook members contributing billions of pieces of information, photos, and videos, resulting in a virtual “second Internet” … residing entirely on Facebook’s servers.
With all of this data, Facebook hopes it can get its members to access their content on their servers using Facebook search rather than Google. They’ve even made it possible for members to communicate and share with their friends without having to log in to Facebook, by allowing you to ‘like’ content on a network of “partner sites” or apps (adding even more content to Facebook’s servers). And to further their agenda to becoming the gateway people use to access the Internet, they’ve recently introduced Facebook email so people will think, “I’m already on Facebook anyway; I’ll just send Mom a message through Facebook rather than my email” (or Gmail).
Once they’ve accomplished this, they can sell targeted ads everywhere—not just on its own site, but across all of its partner sites and apps. If they’re successful, Google search and Google AdWords will be a thing of the past. If you think that’s too far-fetched, think about what Yahoo once was and what it is today.
Is Google nervous? You bet they are. And here’s why. When you search using Google, all they know about you is your IP address, so all Google can tell that website owner is: “The seven people who visited your website were from Ohio.”
But Facebook can say: “Here are the names of the people that ‘liked’ your content, how old they are, what college they went to, what music they listen to, what books they read, how many children they have, who their other friends are …” It’s a marketer’s dream! Think Google isn’t nervous? Think again.
The face of the Web and the Internet is changing. No-one, not the media, not even the experts of the day, foresaw the Internet coming into existence in its current form. And no one truly knows what it will ultimately become. Don’t assume the stuff you sell today will be the same stuff you sell tomorrow. So I ask again: “What will you do for a living when the Web is dead?”
The AP Stylebook, the de facto style and usage guide for much of the news media, announced on Friday that the abbreviated term for “electronic mail” is losing a hyphen, and with it, a relic of a simpler time when Internet technology needed to be explained very carefully.
The move follows the AP Stylebook’s decision to change “Web site” to “website” last year, at which time we wrote, “[We] hold our collective breath for other possible updates, such as changing “e-mail” to “email.’”
Since then the recently much more progressive organization also published a set of 42 guidelines and definitions for social media, though the future of “e-mail” remained very much in flux.
Today’s news, fittingly enough, was first announced on the AP Stylebook’s Twitter page, where they tweeted: “Language evolves. Today we change AP style from e-mail to email, no hyphen. Our editors will announce it at #ACES2011 today.” Look for the change to be in effect immediately in the online version of the stylebook and in the 2011 print version.
What other antiquated tech terms do you wish would be modified or retired? Let us know in the comments.
Earlier this month, the blog Think Progress, a media outlet funded by the Center for American Progress, published a post asking its readers to “Join Our Effort To Expose The Billionaire Brothers’ Far-Right Agenda.”
The billionaires referenced are the Koch brothers, considered by many in the progressive sphere to be the main influencers behind a number of right wing movements currently underway. The post appeared shortly after a senior Koch operative had singled out Think Progress as leading an “orchestrated campaign” against the two brothers, and the blog was responding in kind by asking its followers to donate money to fund its anti-Koch reporting.
How quickly it was able to amass thousands of dollars for this campaign is a testament to the sophistication of The Center for American Progress’ social media operations. Created in 2003, the think tank — referred to often as CAP — is widely considered the progressive response to The Heritage Foundation, the conservative think tank that has highly influenced Republican policy over the last several decades.
CAP contains several branches, including its various media outlets, its action fund, and its Campus Progress (which is geared toward college students). The organization focuses on a mixture of advocacy and influence, ultimately trying to push forward progressive policies into the ranks of Congress, media outlets, and various institutions of power both inside and outside Washington.
During an interview at its downtown DC offices, Alan Rosenblatt, associate director for online advocacy, told me that the Koch fundraiser was originally supposed to amass $10,000 over a several-day period. Instead, it raised it in just a few hours, causing the team to go back and ask for an additional $50,000.
He outlined all the various platforms he has at his disposal for such a campaign, and it quickly became clear over the course of my meeting with him that CAP’s online media operations are vastly more intricate than your typical DC advocacy organization.
Consider its email lists as an example: The main list has over 600,000 addresses, but they’re broken down into dozens of subcategories, including members of Congress and their staffs, members of the Executive and their officials, a subset of activists, and people who have signed up to take action for CAP’s campaigns. “And then we have issue groups,” Rosenblatt said. “And within those issue groups, we have high level influential people, policy professionals, press, and also high level influencers in the government and in the advocacy and policy world. Those lists are culled together from people who come to our events, the contact lists of our policy experts, and then we have sort of secondary lists in each category of people who have signed up on our website for an email list on that particular issue.”
While using these various lists to push out the Koch campaign, Think Progress was able to employ its own considerable reach to amplify the message. The think tank also has multiple channels on different social media platforms, with thousands of fans and followers on various Facebook pages and Twitter accounts. Rosenblatt even created a custom short URL on a pro bit.ly account: Cap.af/kochfund.
Though the Think Progress blog teamed up with Rosenblatt and others within the organization to raise the money for this campaign, such a collaboration is actually rarer than you might think. That’s because Think Progress is a completely autonomous outlet, meaning that its editors have editorial independence from the rest of the think tank.
Mark Zuckerberg may have come to China, but Facebook is unlikely to enter anytime soon. Neither Facebook nor the Chinese government are interested in a messy compromise on freedom of expression (all Chinese networks are censored), especially after the Facebook-fueled revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt.
Instead, China’s social media scene is different from anywhere else: Four homegrown networks are vying for the mass market. Renren, a faithful copy of Facebook, is China’s leader and is planning for an IPO soon. In addition to its nickname-based network (Qzone), internet giant Tencent is at long last awakening to real-name social with its new network, Pengyou. Finally, Kaixin001 is dying, stuck between the decline of its social games and rise of Sina Weibo (China’s Twitter).
In addition to the top four, China also has a “long tail” of social networks that are more specialized — just for children, gamers or lovers. Here, we take a deeper look at those top four networks and what makes them tick.
Renren is like a miniature Facebook with a mean streak and a quest for monetization. One year ago, Renren was concerned that Kaixin001 might overtake it. Kaixin001 attracted a white collar audience before Renren had fully expanded out from its on-campus origins (like Facebook, Renren started at its nation’s elite universities). But Renren has since left the slower Kaixin001 in the dust and is now China’s leader in real-name social networking (even though Tencent’s Qzone has far more users overall).
As one social network operator (who asked to remain anonymous) described it, “Renren is all about business. Kaixin001 has a tech founder [Cheng Binghao] who wants to do more than just copy.” Kaixin001 was reportedly offered the domain name Kaixin.com for 500,000 yuan (about $75,000), but the Binghao passed. The consummate businessman Chen Yizhou, chairman of Oak Pacific Interactive (OPI is Renren’s umbrella group), jumped at the opportunity. OPI set up an exact clone of Kaixin001 at Kaixin.com. That cutthroat tactic was a masterstroke.
Anything Facebook releases, Renren immediately copies: Connect, Like, Places, Groups, etc. To be fair, a few features are localized: brand advertising, a game layer and emoticons.
Renren is strong when it comes to monetization. Brand campaigns are sold to companies at high prices. Fan pages, while free on Facebook, start at 600,000 yuan (about $90,000). That said, Renren’s fan pages are like mini-sites, such as the example from Nike above. Targeting is used only sparingly and the “long tail” of small, local advertisers has yet to arrive in China.
The umbrella group, Oak Pacific Interactive, is building an empire on top of Renren. Renren users are channeled toward Oak Pacific Games (gaming is the traditional cash cow for China’s Internet) and now Nuomi, one of China’s top Groupon clones. OPI is far more aggressive than Facebook in terms of monetization.
Renren has the most open third-party ecosystem of any social network, but unlike Facebook, it has been unable to effectively monetize social games. One of its competitors is now opening up to third-party developers. That could be a point of weakness for Renren.
User experience cannot suffer too badly during Renren’s aggressive monetization and IPO focus in 2011. Renren’s social graph is strong and it executes faster and better than any of its competitors, but it’s still nowhere near as dominant as Facebook is in the West.
Tencent should own real-name social networking in China, but has instead been sleeping on the opportunity until now. Tencent has similarities to AOL, circa 1998. Its walled garden is the Internet for many Chinese, particularly in second- and third-tier cities. QQ, its dominant instant messenger, claims 637 million active accounts, a flood of users that it can direct at any service or content it cares to. Moreover, Tencent monetizes much better than AOL was ever able to via games and virtual goods.
But Tencent struggles among sophisticated netizens (though most still use QQ Messenger) and is playing catch-up in real-name social. Tencent’s most popular social network, Qzone, claims 492 million active users. It’s unclear just how active those users are though; many profiles are simply skeletons. And just like on QQ, many users go by a nickname rather a real name. Users are younger and from comparatively more rural areas of China, making it less attractive to advertisers.
Benjamin Joffe, Tencent expert and CEO of Internet market research firm +8*, states, ”Tencent is definitely not the best in terms of products or innovation — similar to Zynga in that sense — but their ability to deliver a ‘good enough’ mass market service and integrating it within their ecosystem is impressive.”
On January 6, 2011, Xiaoyou’s users were just merged into a new social network, Pengyou (friends), which is finally Tencent’s attempt to reach the entire population of Chinese social networkers.
With Pengyou, Tencent is pushing into real-name social and taking a step toward becoming a more open and mature firm. The network has an open platform with about 90 applications and games – a step forward for the notoriously closed Tencent.
But ”open” still has limits in China. “The problem with the Chinese market is that the social networks are game developers themselves. There is a conflict of interest. If your games are popular, they’re not only not helping you but even put pressure to squeeze you out,” says Liu Yong, the CEO of social games firm Rekoo. Rekoo is based in Beijing, but focuses on the Japanese market.
But Tencent can use QQ Messenger to direct near limitless traffic to its own offerings. On the downside, it’s difficult to persuade China’s sophisticated netizens to “trade down” for a service with a less urbane user base. That’s the reason why Pengyou is Tencent’s first major product that is not branded with the cute and youth-friendly QQ penguin.
The sleeping giant is awakening from its slumber, though it still has a long way to go in real-name social. 2011 should be a decisive year in the Pengyou (friends) vs. Renren (everyone) showdown.
In 2008 and 2009, Kaixin001 gained a widespread following among white collar office workers in top tier cities and threatened to become China’s leading real-name social network. But it’s now in trouble.
Kaixin001′s meteoric ascent was fueled by two factors: 1) social games, and 2) a content forwarding feature, where users share the hottest news, jokes or celebrity gossip, with comments attached.
These two attractions have since lost appeal. Social games have dropped in popularity, and post forwarding — quick updates on the hottest news — is now provided in a purer form by Sina Weibo, China’s popular micro-blogging service. The other opportunity they missed is group buying. Kaixin001 had a huge amount of white collar users, which is the perfect match for a group buying service.
Because Kaixin001 is still popular in tier one cities like Shanghai and Beijing, foreigners in China often have a warped perception of the network’s nationwide popularity. In reality, Kaixin001 does not have much traction elsewhere, nor does it have the funds or network — like Tencent (Pengyou) and Oak Pacific Interactive (Renren) — to push into China’s “lesser-tier” cities.
All the tech insiders I’ve spoken with tell of a site in decline. One post on Zhihu (China’s Quora clone) estimates that Kaixin001′s acquisition value has fallen from 500 million to 50 million ($75 million to $7.5 million). Kaixin001′s Binghao has expressed his ambition to join the rush of China tech IPOs, but that seems highly unlikely.
These setbacks will test the true strength of Kaixin001′s social graph. But not all news is bad. The network does still command a large, high-value audience, and it has strong ties to the Sina Corporation, so being acquired is a possibility (Sina holds a stake in Kaixin001 and Binghao is a former Sina CTO).
Sina Weibo is a microblog that far surpasses Twitter in functionality (threaded comments, groups, audio messages and direct video uploads). And it is hot in China right now. Sina Weibo has more than 100 million registered users, expects to keep growing rapidly, and perhaps even exceeds Twitter in active users. This explosive growth has brought the value of the network up to an estimated $2 billion.
Yu Jin, analyst at China International Capital Corporation, writes: “Microblog services became popular at the end of 2009 as [they] match the needs of Chinese Internet users. They have acquired users at an astonishing speed, to some extent at the expense of SNS websites.”
Sina, also the owner of China’s largest portal site, has lofty ambitions for Weibo that could compete with traditional social networks. It’s constantly experimenting with new features and already seems to have stolen away much of Kainxin001′s audience. You don’t understand China social if you don’t understand Sina Weibo.
The Next Tier of Networks
In China, the difference among the “top four” social networks and the next tier is not as vast as the gulf in the U.S. between Facebook and “the rest.” Notably, 51.com and Douban are two mid-sized networks that are neither mass-market nor niche.
51.com started strong with backing from Sequoia and Giant Interactive and an audience of users in rural areas but now has no chance of conquering the mass market. Social networks often operate on an elite spread basis: You can move down the “social ladder” but not up. It’s no accident that Facebook started at Harvard and Renren started at China’s elite Tsinghua University. Although 51.com has dropped off from the top ranks since last year, it still claims to have 40 million monthly active users. But Chinese tech news site DoNews reports that its peak user base is down from 11 million to 700,000, a big flameout for a site that once had intentions for an IPO.
Douban, an urban network built around fan groups for books, music and movies, has 20 million active users. Douban has a highly engaged and participatory user base, making it worth watching. In addition, there are countless additional Chinese social networks for dating, business, and any other community you can imagine.
Despite government regulations that make the Internet an “invisible birdcage,” Chinese social networks have just enough space to fly. The social media space is diverse and thriving, with Renren, Qzone, Pengyou and Kaixin001 leading the pack. Just don’t attempt to directly port your “global” Facebook strategy here.
Interested in more Social Media resources? Check out Mashable Explore, a new way to discover information on your favorite Mashable topics.
Interested in more Business resources? Check out Mashable Explore, a new way to discover information on your favorite Mashable topics.
