Archive for the ‘Social Media’ Category

Headbox: Bye Bye MySpace?

Date July 23 2009
Posted by Matt
Tagged with

Yesterday, The Independent published an article predicting the end of ‘the place for friends’, MySpace. We asked Headbox Think Tank member Ashley Wilkinson investigates the slow demise of the social networking heavyweight and looks back on the good times that were had.

I remember when I first started using MySpace. I was chatting to a friend from Australia, we were both bored and he said I should check out this thing called MySpace. I set up a profile and filled in some simple information. After browsing through a selection of other profiles I soon learnt that with some basic html you could personalise your profile in any way you wanted. I spent days playing around with my profile and adding new friends.

MySpace was big when I was at school, everyone had a profile. Most people checked their profiles several times a day and eventually the school blocked MySpace access (along with anything else of interest.) Fast forward a few years and MySpace is only ever mentioned with disdain and Facebook is the only social networking site that any of my friends use.

When Facebook first arrived on the scene, no one was interested. It was all very clinical and bland, it lacked any personality. Your MySpace profile was a reflection on your personality and made a big statement about who you were. Facebook on the other hand had the one size fits all approach and wasn’t the creative outlet that we demanded.

As time went on however MySpace slowed down. It was full of spam, pages took far too long to load due to excessive images, videos and flash plug-ins. Communicating with friends was slow and difficult and this allowed the once bland Facebook to launch its attack. Facebook became the easiest way to find your friends, send messages and post comments in a very effective manner. Communication was now the key, with no easy way to find particular friends in your friend list it just didn’t give the fast results you wanted.

When I started university, the only reason we used MySpace was to listen to music on band profiles. It was a legal way to check out a bands music before you saw them at a gig or bought the album. It was also a great place to discover new bands. Facebook use increased because it was an easy and informal way to chat with people you had just met in halls or at social events. MySpace was about individuality and personal expression whereas Facebook focussed on communication.

I think MySpace appealed to a younger audience who cannot go out whenever they want, it allowed them to create a persona, much like with role playing games such as World of Warcraft, and talk to people that they may not ever know in the real world. Older users, who are more independent and actually know most of the people on their friends list, just need a method of communication and something to help them procrastinate, avoiding work at all costs.

Today I check my MySpace profile every couple of weeks if I am bored just to see if I have any messages or comments but cannot remember the last time I actually had any. There is an amusing article on Platform Magazines website where the writers look back at their profiles. It is like visiting a former self because as they discuss, no one has changed their profiles since 2006 and it is a chance to take a nostalgic visit down memory lane.

With founder Tom Anderson now shafted, Rupert Murdoch has set out a new direction for MySpace. It is weird that just a the day before The Independent published it’s article, The Telegraph recieved some information on the new direction that MySpace will be going in. The new vision is that of a creative outlet for all young people’s talents, not just the focus on music. Only time will tell if they can restore themselves to their former glory. MySpace will also be playing catch up in the free ad based music streaming services. With its launch being delayed once again, services such as the hugely popular Spotify and Last.fm have even longer to attract new customers and with MySpace’s somewhat tarnished reputation, I find it hard to see how they will be able to regain the lost ground.

It’s strange to think that something that was so important just a few years ago is probably now going to slowly disappear in to the ether without anyone really caring, I guess it’s a reflection of the ridiculously fast and continuously evolving world we live in. I am not really sad to see MySpace go; the only question that its disappearance leaves unanswered is, who will be next?

P.S. Perhaps in a few years all that will be left of MySpace will be this wonderful spoof clip, MySpace the Movie.

Activation, Blog, Co-Creation, Crowdsourcing, Planning, Social Media, Uncategorized, Wired

Introducing Face Wired: co-created communications planning with social media at its core

Date July 15 2009
Posted by Francesco
Tagged with

Over the last few months we have been busy developing Face Wired and we are now proud to say it has officially launched.

What is Face Wired?  A department within Face that specializes in co-created communications planning, with social media at its core.

Why did we create Face Wired?  Face has a great track record of co-creating with consumers to add real value to projects, whether it is insights or new product development. We have now decided to develop this and apply our expertise and co-creation processes to communications planning. And social media is at the heart of all this.

Social Media isn’t just another marketing channel, it’s the main platform where all media contents converge in terms of distribution and consumption, from tv to gaming, from press to radio, and, most importantly, to personal communications. That’s why Social Media has become today the main platform connecting brands with consumers and that’s why it should always be at the core of the brand strategy and of all brand communications.

Using social media as the environment and the tool to manage and foster brand-consumer collaboration, we designed a three step process to engage consumers and influencers into co-creating communications planning concepts:

- Listening: this is the social media immersion stage where we use Pulsar, our proprietary social media monitoring technology, to map and analyze the buzz about the brand, chart the topics, the issues and the perceptions associated with the brand and identify the influencers that we should involve in the co-creation process.

- Plan: we then bring together a group of users, experts, influencers and brand stakeholder to kick off the actual brand-consumer collaboration. A set of online crowd-sourcing tasks helps us defining the agenda and generating the initial concepts. The most interesting and popular ones are then taken to a smaller sample and a set of co-creation tasks, online and offline, allow us to build on the initial concepts, further develop them and finalize the outputs.

- Engage: Once we have co-created the strategy Face then work closely with the brand to make sure the strategy is implemented correctly or to directly manage the execution. We then train the brand team so they have the skills to manage social media engagement with communities once we have gone.

We have already worked on two very successful pilot projects with Dr Pepper and with Lynx on the Dark Temptation variant launch, which has been their most successful variant to date. We are currently working with Carphone Warehouse on a project about social media strategy that will have organization wide implications and Boots, to co-create marketing insights and communications plans.

Stay tuned for more info and juicy social media case studies!

Co-Creation, Crowd Sourcing, Innovation, Insights, Social Media

The Co-Creation Reader, vol.1

Date July 08 2009
Posted by Francesco
Tagged with

A Guide to the Co-Creation, Crowd Sourcing Conundrum
A common mistake of those new to open innovation & research is to confuse the practice of co-creation with that of crowdsourcing. As a result I thought I would give a quick guide to both, hopefully clearing up any confusion people might have.

The Co-creation 6 Step Process: why we need a structured approach to brand-consumer collaboration
When talking about co-creation people often get the impression that it’s not an exact science but more of an undefined practice. However here at Face we have aclear structured process for successful co-creation, and we thought it’s probably about time we talked about it.

5 Ways to put the “Co” into Co-Creation
As a brand owner co-creation is a fantastic and inspirational way of working directly with your consumers to develop better products and communications. Built on the rock solid foundations of consumer insight co-creation can be fast paced environment, so here are 5 tips to help you when thinking about your role as client in the co-creation process.

Co-Creation: Far More Than Just a Focus Group!
As you know here at Face we are always having interns working in our office and for the past few weeks we have had a great guy called Nathan. Nathan has been getting involved with lots of projects at Face but last week he asked to attend a co creation workshop we were running with some of ourMindbubble women. Nathan very kindly wrote a blog about his experience of co-creationand we thought it’s only fair to share it with you. So carry on reading to find out about Nathan’s first co-creation experience…..

What Makes a Good Co-Creator? Celebrity Edition
Two things are needed to determine whether a consumer is a brand’s 1%er; firstly are they ambassadors of the brand and secondly are they suitable for co-creation. It is a combination of these two elements that makes a 1%er. These co-creators will be part of a process that will produces some great ideas whether that is for a new product innovation, activation brand positioning idea so getting the right person is very important.

Get the Most out of your 1%ers or Adfluentials
As brands’ leading edge consumers they place an increasingly important role in the co-creation process. To find them brands need to start looking at consumers in a fundamentally different way – not just as potential customers who want to buy something from them but as people who want to have a relationship with them.

The 1%ers are not passive respondents but active equals in your brand and they sit at the top of a brand relationship pyramid.

Co-Creation is Driving Change in the Way we Work
A driving principle behind co-creation is the idea that as consumers we want things to be done “with us” rather than “at us” or “for us”. It is a principle at work that will drive change across all aspects of our society. Today my blog covers briefly how it will change the way we work.

Sherlock Holmes and the Origins of Co-Creation
Innovative doesn’t necessarily meannew. It means new in a particular context, not ‘absolute new’. So if anyone ever pitched you co-creation as a new groovy ’social’ thingy, they were simply and utterly lying.

Long before user-generated content, the prosumer, crowdsourcing and co-creation, consumers had already been heavily involved in shaping the present and the future of their beloved brands.