Some interesting questions arise after the kick off presentation: 

• Should agencies rather focus on context of the target audience? Will context drive marketing (communicationss) in the future?
• Which type of agency will be best suited for this in the future? PR or ad agencies?
• What happens when companies piggyback contexts without honestly solving the problems relevant to these contexts – when the branding effect is purely placebo.
• How can you focus on certain contexts, for chocolate bars, for example? You can’t with the current system of target audience definition.
• If the goal is managing relationships with consumers in different contexts, who will do that in the future? The brand, the agency? Probably the brand in the long term, agencies will turn in to coaches.
• Will the time frame for communications programms change? The model of having “quarterly” campaigns can probably not be sustained in the future.

First panel: 

Trend Cocooning
Wie verändert die Krise das Verbraucherverhalten?

With Prof. Peter Wippermann and Roland Kühl v. Puttkammer (Organisator der remix09)

• First, Roland explains the trend cocooning. Prof. Wippermann expands on it. The trend was orifinally coined by Faith Popcorn, before the internet existed in it’s current version.
• Quote Wippermann: Freedom is being defined by technology…
• Prof. Wippermann about scouting the web via software for identifying trends and topics. Sounds reasonable.
• The below 20 year olds search for social connections preferrably online, instead of online. (?)
• Now the panel is extended by two people from the audience: a young guy living in London, and John Groves, one of the sponsors of the conference. They are now discussing their personal media usage.
• Especially younger people don’t have an internet presence such as a “homepage”, but rather facebook profiles, etc. Homepages are oldschool?
• Wippermann: “Die Mitte ist die neue Minderheit” (not sure how to translate that: the average German is a minority)
• People in gerneral are very slow in adopting new things. 34% still calculate prices in Deutsche Mark.
• Who has more knowledge about the consumer: the ad agency or the companies? Wippermann: the companies. Agencies are still busy being “creative”.
• it is an idea of the industrial age to separate everything: ad agencies from the companies. Originally, advertising was part of the companies. In the network age, everything will be connected (again). 
• The middlemen (media companies, agencies) will have to proof their added value. Companies can directly connect with their target audience and gain knowledge.
• Three Trends by Wipperman: freedom defined by technology, success defined by sharing, family as a “negative” trend, because people are afraid/don’t want it…

12:00 – next session is about Hinz&Kunzt, a street magazine sold by homeless people here in Hamburg.

Hinz & Kunzt
Ein gemeinnütziger Verlag im Überblick

• A monthly magazine, founded: 1993 by Dr. Reimers. A brand awareness of 94% The idea: helping people to help themselves. Financially and politically independent.
• Each homeless person is a single entrepreneur. They purchase the magazine in advance for 0,80€ and then sell it for 1,70€ When starting, each reseller gets 10 magazines for free. There are about 400 resellers in Hamburg.
• There also is a website, wich some of the magazine articles as a teaser. They even have a blog (because: you have to have one today…?)

Now I am sitting in this (last) session:

Agenturgezwitscher: Twittern zwischen Tratsch 2.0 und echtem Mehrwert

Bastian Scherbeck and Nicole Simon about twitter for agencies.

• One opportunity: internal communication instead of mail and IMs: it can reduce mail but doesn’t offer all functionalities needed.
• External Communications for clients: it’s all about transparency and trust. The agency needs empowerment when doing this, clients need “courage”.
• (missed the third scenario, as I had to answer an email for work)
• Interesting question from the audience: why should companies twitter? Answer: It depends. And: you can, you don’t have to. 
• A further discussion with lots of questions from the audience arose about why should you twitter, personal accounts vs corporate accounts, etc. Temporarily it was stated that you can do customer service well (not cheaper) – in the future I believe that. Currently twitter has around 60-80.000 users in Germany. That’s a bit small to be a relevant channel for customer service…

XING und die Klassiker
wahlfreie Informationen und Networking statt einfach nur Werbung

Oliver Nickels of IBM starts the session explaining how IBM uses WoM and direct networking to sell their solutions to the German Mittelstand, because it works better than pure advertising.

• Networking is extremely important in German Mittelstand – when it is based on trust. Advertising is too expensive because it’s too broad for this B2B segment.
• IBM created and advertised a “mittelstands”-group in Xing. IBM employees actively posts articles and comments, even distributes flyers during events, etc.
• Speaker changed: now it’s Dirk Reimers of FAT IT Solutions, speaking about benefits of the IBM Xing group. 

In total, it appears to be completely logical to build awareness and consideration via networking – isn’t that how B2B usually works best? Only difference: with Xing these networks expand over time and space…

14:45h Next up is Wolfgang Hünnekens talking about crowdsourcing:

Crowdsourcing
Funktioniert die Kreativität der Massen für das Agenturgeschäft?

The session runs with Markus Roder and Oliver Nickels, but first Wolfgang Hünnekens speaks about crowdsourcing.

• Hünnekens starts way at the beginning and tells the old tale of how crowdsourcing was first noticed and researched…
• The cases mentioned are the usual suspects: Tchibo, Dell, Fiat500… And now that he wants to show a clip, there are technical difficulties.
• The discussion starts with the question: what is creativity? That was a discussion during the last ADC awards.
• Markus Roder doesn’t believe in crowdsourcing, because even if a single person gets to estimate things several times in a row, his aggregated estimates are more on target than each individual estimate. Also: people quite often don’t know what they want from a brand. Cites Henry Ford: if he had asked people what they want, they would have said: faster horses.
• Oliver Nickels: the examples for advertising crowdsourcing were all “risk-free”. Crowdsourcing in product development is always possible. A brand should not be handed over to the “crowd”.
• Interesting question being debated: for which brands could crowdsourcing be relevant? Some brands need to uphold an illusion, a placebo effect to keep up their brand values (Markus Roder).
• Next question is: how do you manage consumer perception of a brand – how does crowdsourcing contribute, if a brand needs to be lived?
• Another fact: brands have to face an increasing lack of control.

I am of a more cynical mindset. I believe that when you’re everything, you are actually nothing.

Right – and not, at the same time. Yes, there will always be more specialized sites for everything FB offers. Flickr is better for photos (in quality, not quantity!), twitter is better for realtime status updates. Many community sites are more topically focused, gaming sites offer better games,… the list can go on and on.

But yet: Spreading your digital acitivities and personas over x-many sites is tedious. Especially if you have different IDs (ok, there will be solutions) and different social networks everywhere. Trying out the top-notch applications everywhere is only fun for the digitally inspired early adopters. For everyone else, a good solution will just do. And believe me: the majority is “everyone else”.

In my own personal circle of friends, facebook is still growing, gaining new fans everyday. (And watching the newsfeed has only become interesting in the last couple of months, as my own network of friends grew.)

I am convinced that the digitally inspired (native or immigrant) underestimate the size and power of the late majority. These people (most of my friends amongst these) will praise those sites, that make a digital whatever easy with a one-stop-shop solution. Of course the quality of the applications and offers can’t be sub-optimal. And for certain topics of interest people might migrate to a specialised competitor. But the rest of their digital activities they might still keep at places like facebook or other sites like it.

The key factor is relevance: as long as facebook offers sufficient relevance, aggregated across all service offers, applications and the individual social network, it will stay top of mind with a large audience. The problem only arises, if facebook becomes second rate at everything they offer. Here I assume: the personal social network is the last resort of stickiness. As soon as your own social network has mostly migrated to other sites, you don’t care to stay either.

What do you think?

One of the most inspiring speaches was the keynote of Jeff Jarvis, who just wrote the book “what would Google do“.

Techcrunch’s Robin Wauters interviewed Jeff Jarvis during the conference for a quick take on the points he made during his presentations at next09:

Video Interview: Jeff Jarvis at Next09 from Plugg Conference on Vimeo.

In the ultimate foreign exchange program, our 100 agents are spending six months behind the wheel of their own Fiesta, sharing their experiences, and completing monthly missions to show you what experiencing the Ford Fiesta is all about, way in advance of the U.S. launch in 2010.

FiestaMovement.com pulls in all of our agents’ content across the web to let you follow the Movement in one convenient place.  And each month will highlight different themed Missions, from Travel, Adventure, and Social Activism to Technology, Style & Design, and Entertainment.

Apparently, over 4.000 people applied for this. You can follow the agents on all the usual social media suspects: twitter, facebook, youtube, flickr and on blogs. Plus potentially a few more – it seems to be up to the individual agents, where they want to be present.

The main campaign site is an aggregator of all the agents’ content. All photos, blog entries, youtube videos,tweets, etc. you can follow on this site, or alternatively via one common RSS feed. Unfortunately, you are not able to participate in any way on the campaign site. No comment option, no voting, etc. At least for now. Once they start the monthly missions (from  May 3rd) this might change, we’ll see. However, it might well be their strategy to keep participation in those places, where the content is, where users are used to participate with content: within the social networks themselves.

According to this source here (in German), the project is the single most important piece of “marketing” for that car. Sounds like there will be no TV, no print advertising, etc. Quite an interesting approach, definitely one I will follow and see how it develops.

I really like social media aggregation projects like this. They are amongst the most complex to implement, believe me, both in terms of technical integration, as well as working out responsibilities and processes within the agency and with the client. Especially when you’re dealing with time frames that last longer than the usual campaign, i.e. at least 6 months, as in this case (if you include recruitment and teaser phase, which we seem to be in right now).

Last, but not least, you need considerable staff 24/7 to maintain the community to filter not acceptable content (yes, for most projects, there will be some!), if they do actually monitor external commentary. (Because, as mentioned above, you don’t seem to be able to comment or participate at all.)

(By the way, does anyone know the agency behind this?)

Need a short URL for twitter? try http://url.so-smart.be/ instead of the typical tinyurl.com – this is a nice marketing idea by smart, the shortest car around.

• A rather cruel (viral) video, could be a little less gruesome, if you ask me. But then, some say, a good viral video needs violence, blood and disgustingness. However, they called it: “violence is no solution” – it’s an advert for a secure  e-commerce shop.

The word of today is funny, I wouldn’t have thought that it makes its way into regular vocabulary so fast:

Your word for 20th March 2009 is

* * * twittering * * *

Please choose the correct definition and click the link.

a) whistling or humming the same tune over and over
http://www.owad.de/check.php4?id=2260&choice=1&sid=1181682

b) sending short electronic texts to let people know what you are doing
http://www.owad.de/check.php4?id=2260&choice=3&sid=1181682

c) nervously tapping the foot or leg as a sign of impatience
http://www.owad.de/check.php4?id=2260&choice=5&sid=1181682

Happy guessing!

So what do you think it is?

It functions like a mini-application that spreads in my own social network of contacts and friends, and I wonder: does it do that automatically, whenever I interact with it? Here is the description of Techcrunch:

WOMI campaigns present visitors with ads asking them for some kind of input either though a multiple choice question or using a text field. SocialMedia then uses this input to customize ads which are shown to the user’s friends on the same social network.

For example, if an ad for Star Wars had a call-to-action asking if I was on the Light Side or Dark Side of the Force, it could take my response and then present my friends with an ad that said “Jason is on the Light Side, how about you?”. In turn, their responses are passed on to all of their friends, making this among the first kind of advertising with a viral element.

This is spooky, unless they definitely ask users before they present their friends with the answers to the multiple choice questions. It’s like a facebook app that spreads as soon as you launch it, without even asking.

If however, the user stays in full control, it could turn out to be rather interesting. Especially if you get to see all your friends responses later on, too. People love to see how they compare in polls and questionnaires. This can be a huge playground for brands. More effective than regular applications/widgets in a sense, because of the “classical” advertising component: “pushing” these polls onto the profil pages of friends and contacts, instead of just mentioning in some news feed “XYZ installed application ABC”.

Related to this, two blog posts by Tom Smith caught my attention in the last couple of days:

Tom first wrote a post about why big brands struggle with social media (marketing):

1. Social Media is often viewed as just another marketing channel

2. It does not fit into current structures

3. Communities and content are global

4. Social media needs a long term approach

5. No guaranteed results

6. The metrics are new

The blogpost caused a long discussion about big brands in social media, causing Tom to write an update called “why we all benefit from big brand being in social media“:

This was around the idea that big brands shouldn’t be active in social media, as the presence of big business will destroy the consumer driven spirit and purity of what the social revolution stands for.

Big brand involvement for some feels like a sellout. However, now that social media is mass market, I strongly believe that this viewpoint misses the big picture. I believe that we all benefit as consumers from big brands being in social media.

1. Social media drives complete transparency

2. Social media drives quality product

3. Social media can be a great customer service channel

4. Social Media creates products that we want

5. You control the relationship

6. Big brands keep our access free

7. Big brands have interesting stories to tell

8. Users drive the content and conversation

Good food for thought, even though I think the example given for the customer service channel is a bit far fetched – I wouldn’t consider a twitter dialogue good service… But hey, some might like that.

Well, here is what can happen if you let the Swedish Style take over the Oval Office:

Not sure about that

But starting in 4 days, people will have the chance to add their own suggestions. Apparently, an Oval Office planner will be up and running by then.

Don’t think, somehow, that Obama will react to that…

If you’re in need of social media case studies, there is a really extensive meta list as compiled by Robin of the Interactive Insights Group. Meaning: it’s a list of links to sites with lists of casestudies. Nothing you can read in one go, but definitely something for your bookmarks.

Secondly, there is a gigantic list of the best internet marketing posts of 2009, as compiled by Tamar Weinberg. Again, bring some time along – or just bookmark it for future reference, as I did

(both found at steve rubels lates links.)

The venue is at Otto Versand, a German mail order company that moved heavily into e-commerce (of course) and seems to sponsor much of the whole event.

Well, more about that I will most likely blog live at my german blog, and yes, I will most likely blog it in German, too.

1. Great Content Always Goes Hot
2. There are No Rules
3. You Can’t Build Quality Relationships Online
4. The More Friends, the Better
5. Social Media Marketing is Easy
6. Social Media Won’t Last
7. Social Media will Replace Traditional Marketing
8. Social Media is a Cure-All
9. Social Media is for Kids
10. Digg is All that Matters

Go to the site and read it, it’s great stuff!

Social networks may never find the ad dollars they’re hunting for because they don’t really have a right to them.

he continues. A provocative statement made to the Digital Non-Conference, a program by Cincinnati’s Digital Hub Initiative. His feeling is, that most social network activity is rather private in nature:

“I have a reaction to that as a consumer advocate and an advertiser,” he said. “What in heaven’s name made you think you could monetize the real estate in which somebody is breaking up with their girlfriend?”

These private conversations are, well, private. But these ads are just as obtrusive as all the advertising in the pub your spending your time with your friends at. We’re used to having social interactions in surroundings covered with advertising. We just don’t want to be interrupted or bothered by it. Most facebook advertising isn’t interrupting. It’s small banner ads on the side of the screen, which I, quite frankly, rarely notice.

And while we talk about moving into places that are largely made up of consumer generated media, he states:

Consumers weren’t trying to generate media. They were trying to talk to somebody. So it just seems a bit arrogant. … We hijack their own conversations, their own thoughts and feelings, and try to monetize it.”

True, but I guess most marketers don’t want to buy regular adspace for the very reason that most people will not notice (nor click) it. So, if they could find more interesting, more effective ways to leverage these communities – e.g. by providing something of more added value, they would happily try it. Like the little ad supported postcards you get in most german pubs. They are widely accepted and people look forward to looking at them every time they pass by the little postcard rack on their way to the rest rooms.

These added value things could be, for example, small applications that enrich your social network profile:

He cited Facebook applications as a potentially valuable vehicle for advertisers, one in which they can create an environment that’s favorable for their brands and consumers alike.

Facebook Apps are just one things. Groups, product profiles, etc. are other possibilities. Imagination and social skills are key to finding these new value adders for social networks…

Even more numbers on the online community of Obama.

A flickr photo set of various social media activity during the Obama campaign.

“Communities dominate Brands” with an Obama Social Media Meltdown,

A simple Google count showing that Obama’s campaign achieved to a lot more Google links in the last few years, than George Bush in his 9 years of term.

Read/write web with a comparison of the activities of MacCain and Obama.