For the longest time, the way we consume television has been evolving in response to our digital advances, an iterative process that now calls upon TV to do the same. Video on demand (VOD) services such as Netflix and LoveFilm initially came about as a niche alternative to video rental stores for those with good home internet - this has since become the choice for many. Now with TV offering video streaming for their own exclusive content the lines have blurred in how entertainment is fed to us.

What’s the difference between TV / cable networks and VOD?

TV networks are rapidly encroaching on VOD territory, specifically HBO who owns all of their programming and churns out hit shows one after another. The threat of HBO GO has become apparent so much that in early January, Netflix declared that their goal was to become HBO faster than HBO can become them. The Netflix original initiative brought about a new season of the once cancelled cult hit Arrested Development and a US remake of House of Cards; however, the intricacies of this new strategy are even more newsworthy.

On demand buffet

With the release of each Netflix original, entire episodes will be made available at once bypassing the more common week-to-week wait; this binge-viewing model will be familiar to those who marathon entire DVD box sets or already subscribe to Netflix for such cause; the interesting part to this story is big data. Because VOD is an inherent digital service everything users do and view will and has already been analysed to engineer the success of Netflix originals.

Netflix might not know exactly why I personally hit the pause button…Perhaps the action slowed down too much to hold viewer interest — bored now! — or maybe the plot became too convoluted. Or maybe that sex scene was just so hot it had to be watched again. If enough of us never end up restarting the show after taking a break, the inference could be even stronger: maybe the show just sucked.

How Netflix is turning viewers into puppets (Andrew Leonard, 2013)

House of Cards was built off the back of viewers who watched the 1990 BBC miniseries on Netflix, a majority of these viewers also happened to like watching movies starring Kevin Spacey or directed by David Fincher; the result led to a US remake of the series starring Kevin Spacey and directed by David Fincher!

Final thoughts

Despite criticism over the all at once approach or the use of algorithms over creativity; my thoughts are that of optimism. For example, TV shows that started off on the wrong foot or would have struggled in that one particularly tough timeslot have more time to find their audience. Long-form serialised storytelling is made more palatable to viewers with the completely optional binge-viewing choice potentially being a far better method than the week-to-week one. In addition, those who love to wait still can because nobody is forced to gorge.

Death of the watercooler?

Sure, the anticipation and discussion over each new episode is great, The Walking Dead’s episodic gameplay was refreshing to many gamers and watercooler moments came each month waiting for the next instalment; but wouldn’t it be weird if every game were to be played episodically? Those fearing the death of watercooler conversation have little to worry about, books aren’t released chapter-by-chapter and are rich with watercooler discussions in the form of book clubs; the only problem I envision is spoilers!

image source: 1, 2, 3, 4

Coca-Cola Polar Bears Film 2013: the importance of an honest branded content experience

What I find really compelling about the Coca-Cola Polar Bear short is that it provides brand marketing without attaching product. Ad awareness is served by the YouTube title and a logo which appears ahead of the content for about twenty seconds before fading away. By being transparent over their involvement Coca-Cola are giving us the chance to opt-out; this matters, it sets-up a feeling of brand honesty, choice and trust in viewers to stay and watch on. Last year’s XFX Power Rangers parody works along the same lines but instead parodies product placement with its own style of heavy-handed promotional techniques.

Unfortunately, Samsung’s Overly Attached Computer is made less compelling by being somewhat covert in their advertising, serving themselves up as the punchline to an otherwise entertaining music video. Adam Saltsman sums it up best with his comment about advergames, saying “I think games that are really blatantly advertisements affect people differently — to me they are much more honest” and it’s true, harbouring a hidden commercial agenda without being honest can rub people the wrong way. This is becoming more apparent in the online space with brands having the option of hosting extended ads on YouTube, product placement dramas, even sponsoring a space jump seen around the world.

As savvy consumers, we have a knack for spotting product placement and have been poking fun at it since Wayne’s World but that doesn’t mean product placement is a bad thing, it’s just that a little honesty in our ad experiences can warm us to a brand while silent/subliminal marketing can be a little uncomfortable for everyone.

image source: 1

Early last year, I blogged about useful content curation tools such as Twitter and Scoop.it allowing us to aggregate the internet and ultimately prevent information overload. The funny thing is that all the news and social media sites we visit on a  day-to-day basis already shield us from overdosing by only showing what we need. The articles. The images. The content. Putting this into context, some 90% of data in the world today has been created in the last two years and we only ever get to see a fraction of it. 

The Human Face of Big Data, a digital crowdsourcing data project launched in late September, attempts to shine a public spotlight over big data and our ability to collect, analyze, triangulate and visualize vast amounts of it in real time. As data gets bigger and more complex, data handlers are needed to identify trends and validate information within vast rows and columns of numbers. The study in itself is made up of fifty personal questions collected from iOS and Android users, ending November 20th; the public will then be invited to freely explore and manipulate an interactive visualisation of their big data.

Data requires human intelligence

Our digital activity is an exponentially increasing footprint fueling a digital ecosystem growing in tandem and seemingly powered by the speed of thought. Marketers want to target advertising, insurance providers to provide better offerings, and Wall Street to make better readings on market temperament. All of this presents pure opportunity to the market with human behaviour collected at a granular level and algorithms derived to further trace the patterns of our actions (Boyd & Crawford, 2011).

Looking at it from a social media monitoring perspective, SMI tools can help brands detect topics of interest and areas for crisis management. Everything is stored with automated intelligence systems crunching out numbers and insights tailored to our needs; however, data doesn’t carry any knowledgable value without the proper analysis; this coupled with the complexity of big data means that human intelligence is the best solution.

Crowdsourcing the future

The Human Face of Big Data introduces new blood into the mix. People with fresher and more creative ideas on critical thinking will have a chance to play with big data. Teens bringing a new energy into the field will find stories behind the data in new and interesting ways and it’s the many possible new angles they’ll approach it that excites. With big data at the top of the research itinerary, we’re beginning to tap into the global brain and crowdsource a new way of learning and leveraging the massive volumes of data our world is immersed in. It’s not just computers that need to think smarter than before; we do too. 

image source: 1, 2, 3

I’ve always felt there was something intangible to China when it came to social media; a place where memes get used by brands for marketing, virtual alter egos exist as fashionista avatars, and corrupt officials are publicly named and shamed. Still, I couldn’t quite connect the dots when it came to understanding why China netizens are so much more wired than say, Hong Kong or UK netizens. Social Media Week’s Social Trend in China panel hosted by Harbour City offered up a pretty good answer to this question by quite simply framing everything I knew about China within the context of social media which then suddenly made sense of it all.

The Cultural factors that make it work

Anyone who takes the MTR knows that commuters are slaves to their screens - silently consuming data in their invisible bubble; but even so, it is less often that you’ll find a guy somewhere in the corner feverishly typing into their phone and nodding to the rhythm of each tap-tap-tap. Such is the case for China as described by Hugo Chan, Managing Partner of WE Engauge, who says that these personalities are commonly created from a combination of external influences i.e. long-term family separation (from within China), the one child policy (with youths compensating by creating their own family of siblings online), affordable broadband internet, and an underlying mistrust of news media (trust is in the masses).

The digital shadow protest

There are also internal influences which are less unique to the makeup of China but their importance is nevertheless amplified in a country where freedom of speech is repressed. Identity & recognition (the power of a single voice), opacity of rank (connecting with government officials and celebrities alike), and the ability to share & debate are useful tools in the virtual empowerment of an otherwise vertical society. For example, ”Weiguan” (围观) is a netizen term that calls attention to the power and passivity of online protest; re-tweeting a sensitive topic is seen as acknowledging an injustice which is of no harm in itself. 

In reality, however, there is a silent protest taking place behind the scenes that sends out the message that the people are unhappy with what’s going on and are willing to let fellow netizens hear about it. Each unique view then becomes a projection of netizen power that grows with the masses (David Wertime, 2012).

The “customise” culture

Does China copy from Western social media platforms? Yes and no. China draws influence from what came before but they also repurpose it into something that is more palatable for the people. When Sina Weibo was launched back in 2009 it was easy to write it off as the Chinese version of Twitter; fast forward three years and its much clearer to tell apart the differences such as Sina Weibo’s inline pictures & videos, threaded comments, message board functionality, maps, page analytics, promotion zones, and app market. These features have all come together to make Sina Weibo a true destination platform for content discovery; something that Twitter is still struggling with themselves.

Not everything is made to be social

It’s easy to imagine China’s social media landscape to be a reflection of our own but there are actually parts of it that, unlike Western social media, are created to be less social. Take for example, video sites such as Youku, Tudou, and PPTV; they all lack the social sharing buttons that we’ve come to expect with YouTube. That’s not to say videos can’t be shared it’s just that not all content on these sites are created with sharing in mind. Copyrighted content such as syndicated TV opera and live show events such as The Voice of China are hosted on these sites - effectively creating an online TV station with long-form display ads served up as TV commercials; media such as this doesn’t lend itself very well to the grab-and-go culture of sharing online. 

Final thoughts

It seems that everything I’ve come to know about China; from the politics, the culture, to the technology is exactly why social media is so powerful in the country. In addition, Sina Weibo, Renren, Youku etc are platforms made for the people first so there is no homogeneous rounding of the corners (UI, features, etc) to fit the international mold of user.

Why is China so wired for social media? 

Because it’s China!

image source: 1, 2, 3, 4

I should have uploaded this back when it was fresh and more relevant but better late than never. My 2009 Msc research paper explored human behaviour and friendship online, it looked at the disparities between face-to-face communication and computer-mediated communication. I remember it being a hard sell to my supervisors at the time; an excuse to surf Facebook they would say! 

Looking back through the research it’s clear to see that there was a certain uneasiness about discussing Facebook in offline situations. It was almost like an admission of guilt that you enjoyed spending time talking to people online more than offline. But three years has changed a lot, social media has not only become the norm it has become a term that people recognise and understand. It’s funny to see that the social media buzzword wasn’t cited once in my paper considering its overuse these days. Now for some extracts.

The tonal conversation shift between friends offline to online

“…the FtF setting fostered a situation where politeness was factored into the equation in order to avoid offending other people (especially when making first impressions), on the other hand, CMC raised a barrier which negated first impression politeness and fostered humour instead. This is more apparent when the communication barrier makes being oneself hard to convey; in its place, irony is used to compensate.”

Macro-coordination and micro-coordination

“Macro-coordination and micro-coordination compliment each other when used for arranging FtF meetings. Email is used for making general arrangements and determining the availability of each individual whilst micro-coordination is used when plans are finalised and the journey has begun.”

The use of photographs as a communication tool

“Communication tools on SNS such as photographs help to close distances between friends a great deal; however, SNS cannot truly sustain a friendship if FtF contact in the traditional sense is not present.”

The entire research paper can be found here.

Watch Dogs E3 reveal trailer is a “technomancer”

The plot comprises of an interesting premise where in a world controlled by computers who controls the computer? Personal data collection is the key commodity, you are a data cluster casting a digital shadow of over 2.3GB representing every moment of your digital life and revealing how you think and what you believe. That information could be turned against you, not just to sell products, but to influence your world views.

There has been a noticeable uptake in brands giving the public a vocal influence over product and marketing decisions, this could stem from the internet’s ability to crowdsource on a global scale. Most recently the Occupy Wall Street protests, Stop SOPA, and KONY 2012 have seen mainstream attention garnered from both offline and online sources. In addition, Crowd funding has had its share of attention with Tim Schafer of Monkey Island, Day of the Tentacle, Grim Fandango fame reaching out to fans to fund the development of a new point-and-click adventure game on Kickstarter. Fans were given the power to become stakeholders in a project that would never have got off the ground otherwise.

Grassroots: growing the passion point

Successful campaigns are fueled by the passion of fans, a great example of this is the “pay it forward” scheme where fans share their love over something with close friends in order to generate word of mouth buzz. However, the success of this approach can be rather hit and miss with prizes at stake, this ultimately inspires a lack of community and divides passion rather than bringing it together.

But alternate reality gaming has created a sense of community time after time through experiences that call on people to solve the game as no single person can do otherwise, the rewards are generally shared so there is nothing to lose and everything to gain in this instance.

Based on the Halo fiction, ilovebees was an original radio drama that was deconstructed and delivered to consumers over an unlikely broadcast medium: ringing payphones. ilovebees was a giant multi-player, multi-platform story, immersing players in the world of Halo2 in the four months leading up to the title’s record shattering launch.

During the campaign players hunted down and answered payphones in all 50 states and several countries around the world. Each week a new episode was broadcast to the phones which the players obsessively sought out in order to unlock the content online for the broader community playing the game.

I Love Bees Campaign (42 Entertainment)

Recent cases of crowdsourced marketing at work

Case 1: Fan involvement in movie score (The Dark Knight Rises)

In November 2011, Hans Zimmer reached out online for fans to contribute to the chanting heard at the end of the first teaser trailer to The Dark Knight Rises. They could record their sample of the chant, Moroccan for “He Rises, He Rises”, which Zimmer would then cut into the final score.

The chant became a very complicated thing because I wanted hundreds of thousands of voices, and it’s not so easy to get hundreds of thousands of voices. So, we Twittered and we posted on the internet, for people who wanted to be part of it. It seemed like an interesting thing. We’ve created this world, over these last two movies, and somehow I think the audience and the fans have been part of this world. We do keep them in mind. And I thought it would be something nice, if our audiences could actually be part of the making of the movie and be participants in this.

Hans Zimmer on The Dark Knight Rises (Collider, 2011) 

Case 2: Entertaining market research (Nestle Kit-Kat Chunky)

This was UK market research on a grand scale. Peanut butter, white chocolate, orange, and double chocolate flavours were launched in January 2012 under the limited-edition banner. The public were then given the chance to vote for their favourite flavour on Facebook or by scanning posters for the campaign with the Blippar app. Well over half a million votes later peanut butter was crowned champion with 47% of the public vote and permanently added to the Kit-Kat Chunky roster.

Case 3: Early access to content (The Dark Knight Rises)

Another great instance spinning out from The Dark Knight Rises marketing machine came in April 2012 with the tweet graffiti campaign. The third trailer for the much hyped movie was set to be screened infront of The Avengers in cinemas on May 4th; howver, if users could find the Batman graffiti listed in real world locations across the world, it would go live ahead of official release which it eventually did.

Morphic resonance

The common thread to of these cases comes down to the interconnected web and our ability to harness it as a networking platform but more so than that, there is a an invisible concept at work that plays out behind the scenes.

Biologist Rupert Sheldrake explains the term morphic resonance as a memory principle that forms around social groups such as a flock of birds, a school of fish, or an ant colony. This extends toward the friendships and interconnections we create in modern society feeding into our collective memory and our influence over others with the morphic fields we share.

What you do, what you say and what you think can influence other people by morphic resonance. So we’re more responsible for our actions, words and thoughts on this principle than we would otherwise be.

Rupert Sheldrake (Crossroads Times, 2012)

Neuromarketing gone viral

If morphic resonance can explain how laughter is contagious and why people are tempted to join a really long queue without knowing what it’s actually for, it may go a little way into explaining the viral nature of the meta experience because we are driven by a subconscious and telepathic desire to contribute within our social groups (family, work colleagues, football teams).

If marketers can rally fans around a brand and then solidify this attachment by creating a shared experience that carries emotional weight, our human brain will give these experiences meaning and extra stickiness in our minds. Furthermore these unique experiences have the ability to be shared through social networks and then read on the largest morphic resonance field that we share in common, the internet.

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Watch: Jon Ronson meets his Twitter spambot / infomorph IRL

Adopting the avatar and namesake of the real Jon Ronson pushes this video slightly over the edge for me. In the video Dan and Luke, the academics providing research and consultancy for the company behind the infomorph defend their use over the name: @Jon_Ronson by claiming free domain; after all, how many Jon Ronsons are there in the world? But in my opinion, it legitimises defamation when presented alongside a pixelated photo of ‘the real McCoy’. I’m guessing that this is why Luke decided against picking a similar name to his own when testing out the infomorph algorithm on himself: @postuser.

@CherylKewl tweets in the accent that Cheryl Cole is famous for having and Felicia Day has an evil twin called @DeliciaFay, these examples go to show that fake celeb accounts are everywhere; however, the ‘infomorph’ is far from parody, not quite malicious in nature but defamatory in intent.

Send in the clones

Based on my own snap opinions from watching the video, I browsed through Twitter and found a wave of heavy criticism against the three guys in the video. Clones of them had even started to emerge all created within the parameters set by the infomorph but manned by humans instead of an algorithm.

• Real Dan O’Hara: @skeuomorphology | Clone: @Dan_O_Hara
• Real David Bausola: @zeroinfluencer | Clone: @DavidBausola
• Real Luke Robert Mason: @LukeRobertMason ‏| Clone: @lookrobertmason

Is there a Big Bad Wolf to this story?

In the fallout, the man behind infomorphs, the real David Bausola tweeted to the real Jon Ronson:

Could you publish the entire 1 hour interview with us? You edited out most of the explanations. (29/03/12)

I was then reminded of The True Story of the Three Little Pigs and the recent Guardian open journalism Three Little Pigs ad. What was the whole story behind this infomorph / spambot debacle anyway?

Final Thoughts

Dan and Luke followed up the video with their article how bots are taking over the world and in an Andy Kaufman style approach, I can see how the infomorph algorithm may have been created for bringing public attention to a robotic world. But this really hinges on whether we ever get to see the full unedited video interview from Jon; and if David decides to close the @Jon_Ronson account now that it has served its purpose.

Dan’s mention of these ‘invisible systems’ that could be used to rule ruin our lives are not definite but where these fake accounts are concerned, it may actually be the case once the Google SEO algorithm kicks in.

Google tailors your search engine results page to your social data but it only grafts a layer over public search results so if these Twitter infomorph / clones build a historical username presence by tweeting nonsense, talking to MPs, and sharing xxx links (linkbuilding); I wonder how Google’s search results page will go about ranking the real Jon Ronson, Dan O’Hara, David Bausola, and Luke Robert Mason against their noisy doppelganger a few months from now?

Update:

http://jon-ronson.weavrs.info was retired at 18:29 GMT on Monday 2nd April 2012. He was at the Rich Mix Cultural Foundation Center in East London.

The blog and Twitter account will remain online in memory of an astonishing chapter in the development of Weavrs.

A Gonzo Weavr Documenter (Philter Phactory, 2012)

London was buzzing over the past few days with the excitement surrounding Social Media Week - a global conference that strives to refresh and re-engage our insights when it comes to the digitally evolving climate. Here is a round-up of events:

Facebook goes public

With a Facebook IPO in the midst, the social networking heavyweight was scrutinised in Quirk’s Should Brands Be Banned from Social Media debate. Facebook will be looking for greater ways to monetise users and brands alike, all this comes at a time when monthly growth rates are dipping for the company but there still is unprecedented potential in the brand as a destination platform rather than for links and referrals. For example, the tweet has wrapped itself around major public events to become a unique destination for live communication at a global scale. Of course, with social media now a major part of our digital lives it has become a more desirable place than ever for brands to engage, which raises the question of how far brands should go when it comes to social media in the friend space; can you be really be friends with a brand? For a full breakdown of events see the results here.

For the motion:

• Brands cheapen the social space and they surrender their stats and analytics information to social networking sites such as Facebook and Google
• Social media is not free advertising and it is difficult for brands to know they acheived any ROI 

Against the motion:

• Brands generally have the best content on the web driven by social media
• Brands are forced to be transparent, open and honest (i.e. John West is environmentally held accountable for the sustainability of it’s tinned tuna stock) 

The de-tag generation

With web search moving to shape itself around our interests and friendships online, The Future of Social presentation with Kirsty Bell, Head of Social Strategy at Yomego, explored the divergent internet and the theory of the interpersonal ties which dictates our loosest connections are in fact our most powerful.

Because the information we receive from close friends overlaps considerably with what we already know, we are presented with a digital barrier to discovery and may seek to un-tag our online identity in a bid to reclaim the internet for ourselves.

The attraction of distraction

In the Never Mind the Buzz panel hosted by DOCO; Amelia Gammon, VP of International Mobile at Fox Digital Entertainment mentioned the number one priority for a TV network has always been to pull in the ratings, however,  the popularity of twin screening has meant that networks also leverage the power of social media to provide a complementary layer to the viewing experience.

Social buzz is so powerful that it can determine whether a TV show lives or dies, with networks now looking at the top TV shows by mentions in conjunction with audience ratings. The panel closed off with an interesting discussion point, asking if TV is the piece of art and social media, the frame, what happens when people pay more attention to the periphery. Can the twin screen viewing experience be flipped around or will our attention flip along with it?

Case Study - TV Networks

• Fox Premiered New Girl online before airing it on TV to generate buzz
• Networks want to pull in the ratings first, social media is wrapped around this construct as an additional complementary experience
• To promote The Muppets Movie, @DisneyMoviesUK allowed Kermit the Frog to take over their Twitter feed for one day. This led to a massive surge in followers
• For TOWIE, the broadcaster provided each member of the cast with a Blackberry phone and Twitter training to increase presence via social media channels
  • Positive = bring social media in-house
  • Negative = un-moderated forum for discussion
• Angry Birds Rio, a marketing tie-in game was released 6 weeks ahead of the film’s release (Rio), this established the IP ahead of time
  • The iPhone game reached 12 million downloads before RIO’s release, it currently has 120 million downloads
• The goal with social media is to create communities to engage with each other. Engaged people are more willing to spend on optional micro-payments and DLC which accrue over a massive install base i.e. Facebook

Less data, more insight

The final presentation in my line-up, From Social Data to Social Insight by Precise confessed that tools providing sentiment analysis were at best 60% accurate because contextual information cannot be discerned from an algorithm. Instead, we need to work with the data to discover the human meaning behind what people say on the internet and why they say it.

A pretty funny example of what context means to an algorithm was then shown:

Looking ahead

As Social Media Week came to a close, I was left feeling optimistic that that social media is an iterative process, some brands may threaten to cheapen the environment with lazy marketing practice but only the good will rise to the top and they will shape the framework for how brands connect with with us in the future. 

Article Provided for Neoco

image source: 1, 2

Social Media Should Not be Censored