I guess there is a certain vibe, a certain stigma about New York City. It’s a city on overdrive and it will and can fry your senses if you’re not careful. Mentally, physically, literally, metaphorically.

The city is a curious mix of architecture marvels with history and people. From the eco friendly Hearst Tower, the dimly lit chanderliered entrance of the Royal Palace Hotel, eclectic little shops in Soho and the Lower East Side to the rather sterile concrete buildings of Wall street. The Brooklyn Flea houses a collection of quirky little trinkets and items, and itself is housed in a stately building that was converted from a bank; a stark dichotomy.

Graffiti here is spontaneous and in the oddest of places, narrow subway underground tunnels the top of buildings, each a defiant testament to the people who claimed the space as their own. Not in a tightly controlled environment where a canvas is laid out in front of a curious audience. Like at the Night-festival in Singapore, anyone? Cough. I think that defeats the purpose of it. Don’t think the organizers understood the essence behind graffiti. The only people who should see graffiti being created should be the artists and their friends. Watching it appear in front of you, in a space dictated with crowds of curious spectators watching, with no element of risk, danger or mystery as expected just takes away the soul and experience of it.

I could do a photo series entitled subway trash of still lives – even the trash here somehow manages to look like a still-frame out of a movie.

Ben Stiller walked past us one weekend morning, apparently.

The size of rats vary with the parts of the city – the big black mean ones reside in Manhattan; small furry ones are found on the outskirts. The friendly mouse looking ones live in the Jersey PATH trains.

If you are anticipating a long subway commute, you probably want to switch your iPhone off while underground if you don’t want to find your batttery at 60 % even before the day has started. Why there has been no serious motion to actually get reception that works well underground or even in various buildings is beyond me. It is kind of like the weekend commute, when basically, the best thing is to expect nothing out of the subway reliability.

Sirens are your lullabies. You grow accustomed to it. The police and fire engines are just, everywhere.

Phones are socially taboo (at least it seems so at most eating spots) or maybe it’s a function of the crazy bad reception. People are engaged with each other here, and with time being such a precious commodity, one notices that cellphones are hardly the focus and the ones whom you meet grant you their attention, for choosing to spend the time.

Colours do not exist in the NYC fashion palette in winter. Everyone wears black black and more black even though the racks have a staple of black, white, red and the occasional electric blue. Who dictated that fashion has to mirror the season? Even within the line at JFK, I was standing out in a bright and (too) happy red.

Unaccustomed to the landscape so distinctly mirroring the seasons, visual cues start to hint to me the arrival of spring. Lighter coats, rain boots, slight colours, (short) skirts. People complain about the heat but hardly ever about the skirts. Do they not see the necessity of the former for the latter to materialize? Thank goodness for the cheeriness of Summer.

The city is edgy, fast paced, if that is your type of fun. Small enclaves of communities exist and in time, I intend to explore these when I’ve gotten my wings fixed. Sometimes the cashier mistakes me for Korean and rattles musically about the items I’m ringing up until I give a polite “I don’t understand you” in English. At other times Korean guys remark really loudly “a Chinese” as I’m trying to get up the steps to dinner in Ktown. I am unsure of the correct response to this so I do nothing save roll my eyes. Ethnicity seems to be a topic of conversation with random people taking bets as to whether you are Korean or Chinese in the most random of places.

Definitely pay more attention to your Chinese lessons if you are still in school, especially if you want to order take out from Ctown. Actually, make that if you want to order food in general. D:

Outside of the tourist belt, there are hardly any children, teenagers or too many old folk. Everyone seems to float around the college age to the young working professionals. And then there are the others, who seem to have decided that being perpetually in Peter Pan mode is their thing. Over 45 and still living like recklessly 25 is just a little creepy. Just sayin’.

There is also the distinction between “the tourists” and “New Yorkers”. Tourists are roadblocks, the grown up children who still find delight in every cranny of the New York environment. New Yorkers are past that – police road blocks and a barrage of media vans and satellite for Osama’s capture or “that IMF guy” being held in an undisclosed location in lower Manhattan? Just part of everyday life, now will you please, not hog the sidewalk so I can get to my cup of coffee/work/you get the idea? Your local news is global here. Something is always happening; somewhere.

I love how people actually care about stuff here.

Chivary is alive and well in the city because here is nothing more odd in their senses for a girl to be carrying a shelf on the streets.  People have also been awfully kind to help me move my furniture that I got from them, so maybe I have just been lucky so far. You can get quite a lot out of a conversation in the 30 minutes while moving your desk. So awfully DIY, but just one of those things you do before you succumb to the instant gratification that is Amazon. On an aside, if one ever contemplated never ever having to leave your house, Amazon could fulfill all your hermit aspirations.

Door holding is nice and I hardly get any slammed in my face if I am within close proximity. Anyone who has tried to get into a lift in SG with plently of space, only to have the door closed on you because everyone was too apathetic to press the Open Button will understand this. It’s the little things that count.

What’s better than holding the subway door seconds just before it closes, is having two young teenage guys hold it open for you, upon seeing your approach and not even missing a beat in their conversation rhythm. Equally heartening is having a random stranger call out to you when you are at the far end of a corridor which only leads to an elevator, just so they can wait for you to enter.

Well, obviously there are rude people as well, but perhaps the word is not so much of rude than brash.
Weather is a huge factor here because it dictates your life. It’s the first time weather reports are actually accurate or important. The coats change with the seasons, and rain coming horizontally at you renders normal umbrellas useless. Let’s not even talk about the winds.

Things will go on even if it rains. At the Rooftop films, the organizers quipped that “We’re tough , we’re New Yorkers”, and the show went on. Seats were kept and folded after the show by each member of the audience, ” just so a lot of us can get out there faster”.

The weather is unapologetically capricious and erratic – winter seemed never ending with the fresh white snow quickly morphing into black piles of slush. There was a brief dalliance with spring and upturned umbrellas. People marginally freaked out over the earthquake aftershocks. Hurricane Irene brought the City to a standstill whilst everyone went stir crazy being confined indoors. Coming from a country with NO natural disasters, you realize you have no clue what to actually do, but you get by. It snowed in Autumn and this surprised the trees in Central Park and many of them broke under the weight.

It seems counter intuitive to find contentment in a restless city, but that’s what New York can offer you, amongst a whole lot of other things. Transience is the only staple. The city has a routine of constant change, and possibilities in anything you believe in, if, of course, you search it out. Or maybe it might find you instead.

The City will speak to you, if you listen to it. The same City, but somehow in a different language for everyone.

^ And more photos, only because they remind…

See the full gallery on Posterous

Landed at the login page of Twitter today (one of the rare moments when I’m not on a third party platform) and decided it looks uncannily like an older version of the Facebook login page from the placement of the various elements to the world map in the background.

Imitation, is the best form of flattery, I suppose. Just one of those random afternoon musings.

Mad crowds at the 5th Ave Apple store which kind of contrasts nicely with the minimalistic store design.

View from across the street:

.

Looks the same but apparently with better technology, so. This design doesn’t really speak to me so hopefully next round it changes. I was watching this kid (he must have been about 10) check his Facebook account at the store. At least, I hope that was his account! Hilarity usually ensues when people forget to log off their social networks on public terminals.

On a random note, everything in this post was created on an Apple. It’s my camera, Photoshop, writer, everything!

It’s tragical I’m in NYC without a compact camera because I -thought- an iPhone would suffice. The cold has made any photo ops without gloves mostly difficult and I am pleased to report that you can really use your nose to unlock/operate the iPhone as was suggested to me. Laughing fits kind of affect the results though. Because race and gender issues are more salient here, I also suppose this would work better if one had a sharper nose. Just sayin’.

I had the pleasure of running into Mary-Anne, who’s the festival director, all the way from Bondi and she shared some behind the scenes snippets of everything. It’s pretty interesting how she highlighted the need for entrance fees to a lot of the exhibits and events in Singapore – maybe this differs quite a bit from other places? Never quite noticed it, tbh.

She also spoke about soul, and passion (or perhaps the lack thereof in some situations), something that I had to agree with her. Sometimes things can get a little too clinical, too restrained around here. Until the generation learns, we’ve just got to live with it I guess. I constantly miss the ease that one can strike up a random conversation overseas, small talk, and all that jazz.

Sustainability was another thing – Fullterton had been supposed to turn of the lights to offset the energy usage from all of the installations, but somehow this wasn’t happening <?>. Pity, because the initiative definitely had a good intent. Even the paper fans that were distributed, on “paper from sustainable forest sources”.

I loved how there seemed to be a mixture of planned and unplanned interactions going on. There were some workshops at One Fullterton, where people were apparently turning plastic bottles into art. Photography buffs with their tripod and camera gear all around, snapping away. Curious gazers who just happened to wander in – the families, the couples, the accidental tourists on their own home turf, those experimenting with the technology capturing and projecting their images in a mosiac pattern on the screen….

Love the iphone App loading image too! I love the sketchy style and the mood of it, and the little plays of light. This proved really useful when trying to navigate through and planning the exploratory route.

You can check out more info here. I believe there are guided tours for those who want some directions, else its really much more fun if you take your own time to explore the area and just enjoy the scenery, literally.

Apart from mistaking another light installation at the Marina Barrage as the actual artwork itself, which was kind of hilarious..the only other thing was the haze which obscured some of the view on Day 1, but Day 2 was much better. It’s a bit of a stretch to try and cover everything in a day, but definitely worth it.

It’s on till the 7th of November, so if you haven’t caught it, you really should. I recommend the stretch from the Customs House all the way to Marina Bay Sands, where most of my favourites were concentrated. Awesome stuff!

Americans spent more time socializing on Facebook than searching with Google for the first time in August, and Yahoo edged out the search giant in monthly traffic, according to new data from marketing research firm comScore.

Information is being created at an amazing speed. The folks over at Youtube quip that “every minute, 24 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube.” But correspondingly, human capacity to process, comprehend and store this cannot possibly mirror this exponential growth. This capacity remains the same, and hopefully all that talk about how the internet is making us stupid is not true.

So what interests me about the RWW article was the intricacies of the nature of interactions on each site/platform as well.

Say Google really delivers the quick and streamlined search results (even before you finish typing..Google Instant anyone?). How does this affect their ad revenue model if it’s working so well and a user skips off(albeit happily) in the few seconds of interaction?

When I grow up, I want to be just like (you)?

With Facebook…

- Trying to be Yahoo with the newly rolled out Facebook Answers, which doesn’t seem to have the superior targeting engine that Facebook ads seems to have… because none of the questions have been particularly compelling enough to click on. Not sticky. It is also seemingly mostly perpetuated by USA centric discussions so the lack of local probably is another factor as well.

- Trying to be Foursquare with Facebook Places that nobody in this parts can access without a VPN (seriously..), which I would say has greatly affected my experience naturally.

I’m still logging into Facebook daily though.

I don’t use the Yahoo portal much honestly but their mail interface really works for me over Gmail. I suppose new ways to present old stats will always surface and I suppose part of this is that it’s interesting to have a sexy title that any other company could challenge and (gasp) beat Google at its game. In perspective, it’s really all about how you define “beat” as well. It depends on your purpose. Am I going to stop returning to Google because they can quickly direct me away (incidentally to exactly where I want to go)? No.

Here’s another perspective on the overall picture, since the Comscore data seems to focus largely on the USA  – Google still ranks tops on sites like Alexa, and there are whole lot of other related properties like Youtube, Blogger and etc so collectively it will be interesting to see how each entity fares. If Twitter would not fail whale so often, I wonder if they would move up as well. 

At any rate, I just came across this post here that claims people spend more time on Facebook than on Google‘s sites combined. You will notice I use the word “claims” because I still think everything is too subjective nowadays until there is a unified way to look at things across the board, one site’s claim is only as sound as you make it to be.

(Search)

On an aside, Search was one of the topics that happned to be discussed when Mel Carson from Microsoft Advertising came down from the UK. Had a nice cozy chat this week with a couple of other practitioners together with Mel…and interesting that he highlighted his background in SEM.

Search is important and I figure it shapes the way you learn, because in essence, you dictate what your perception on the topic is. Like the case of BP (something that was brought up a couple of weeks back in another setting, so I just wanted to hear opinions on this), and I’m still on the fence about how ethical, or “right” it is for brands to spend on search to have control over the results. And case in point- BP and the oil spill disaster.

During the conversation, Mel shared that it was something like 57 thousand to later 3.6 million that BP spent on Google Adwords. Which is an astonishing jump if you think about it. The stats are also up at this post from Adage.

BP’s increase underscores how important Google has become for reputation management, and in the battle for public opinion. In the wake of the spill, Google was a natural first stop for people seeking information, and BP bought up dozens of keywords associated with the disaster such as “oil spill,” “leak,” “top kill” and “live feed” as it vied for clicks with news stories, images of oiled wildlife and plaintiff attorneys trolling for clients.

“Google has become the remote control for the world; it’s the first stop, not TV,” said Will Margiloff, CEO of Innovation Interactive, a unit of Denstu. “More than any other media, that messaging is requested; people are seeking BP’s answers out as opposed to waiting to be told.”

Clearly there are implications for PR, Crisis and Reputation Management, since this is just another arsenal that can be utilized. Not one of the more discussed strategies, since most people are typically more focused on the tangible responses (Did the CEO apologize? Did they have a press release?..etc). It’s pretty much impossible to try and control social media (people are going to share what they want to anyway), but the public can’t read what they can’t find if you’re going to manipulate search results that way. So at least some of the traffic can be redirected that way.

And just to document the thoughts from another conversation, I think Greenpeace are actually one of the world’s most successful creative agencies or filmmakers or storytellers if you think about it. If I ran an agency I would be hiring someone like their creatives for projects. It is exceedingly difficult to defeat a machine powered by passion. Some of the content they produce, or the way they can mobilize the masses is just nothing short of amazing compared to some of the other “official” creative advertising.

The mind is an interesting thing. Sometimes just starting to think about a single topic can lead onto so much more. Short of titling all future blog posts “random thoughts of the day (date)” etc I haven’t quite found a way to address this when trying to consolidate certain thoughts.

This has been a good week of conversations, I seriously hope this continues!

Other previous Search/Social related posts

Social Media Sticky Behaviors – Google & Facebook

Search Portals v.s Social Networking Sites – A Fight for the Advertising Dollar (& our eyeballs)

Given that the heatwave of Summer is probably over, the weather has been incredibly agreeable with me, save for the sauna that is the Subway. I am loving the Summer outfits and feel of the city; quite a stark contrast to the all black or mostly bundled up crowd and rainy, wet streets from the past few visits in Winter and Spring.

Times Square continues to be a full blown assault on the senses. There is really no other way to try and describe this sensory overload – sights, smells, the weekend rush, the PRE-weekend rush, or should I say, perpetual rush…and the very suspect smoke steaming from the underground.

There is the juxtaposition of big branded billboards, and odd billboard like the below…which someone definitely needs to explain to me.

DO I GET RESULTS? DO I HAVE A BILLBOARD IN TIMES SQUARE?

There’s people everywhere right up till late night, dining al fresco, even the solitary old man on the corner table with a chess set all laid out, waiting for an opponent to sit down to game with him. Times Square is swarming with tourists like ants and there are a couple of new interactive billboards from AE and F21.

Social Media

….is more prevalent in New York than it is in Singapore, even compared to a mere 2 years ago, there are perceptible differences.

Very cool – AE plants your mug shot on their space when you make a purchase, and F21 simulates a leggy model taking a picture of the street below, which is, in fact an actual real-time shot of the current crowd. This then animates into a Polaroid snapshot, real-time used in a great way there. There are also the love tweets on F21 related content.

I missed my 24/7 internet so, and only periodically had access to things like Foursquare specials from American Eagle at Jersey Gardens. (Public Wifi, FTW!)

New York is inspiring, even in the strangest of places. It can be overwhelming at first, downright antagonistic in the winter, but every time that I’ve been back it just gets better and better. For some strange reasons.

I still believe that where you are defines who you are to some extent, but it has been a while since I’ve let a place change me. I hear constant calls, still.

But the funny thing is this is also the first time I am here; there; but also home.

At first glance, very cute, nicely done graphics, right down to the psuedo 3D shadows. I only have one issue with all this. The dustbin seems to play a major role in all this, rather than the people who actually contribute to litter. In the second picture, we even see a jogger hurling a piece of trash flippantly onto the pristine beach.

While the message is to “Help keep our parks clean for all to enjoy”, why is the responsibility of doing so left to an inanimate object? All this only points more to a culture that expects, probably even assumes someone will clean up after them.

]]> http://www.dorothypoon.com/2010/07/13/national-parks-love-green-messaging/feed/ 0 http://www.dorothypoon.com/2010/06/16/communicasia-skype/ http://www.dorothypoon.com/2010/06/16/communicasia-skype/#comments Wed, 16 Jun 2010 14:25:43 +0000 Dorothy http://www.dorothypoon.com/?p=1042 Popped by the Skype booth at CommunicAsia with a bunch of other bloggers, thanks to the folk over at XPR! Loved the booth, which was like a breath of fresh air and probably the most well designed amongst the others at the exhibition.

Branding wise, these guys have got it down…from the almost irreverent and fun decorations (think rainbows, clouds and synthetic grass) to the friendly staff that were hanging around the booth.

All this extends to Skype-blue Slushees, and the iPhone case….All great talking points as well.

Peter, one of the faces of the social media team, whom you can also find over on the Skype blogs.

_______________________________

Curious about the Skype story in online conversations in Singapore, this is what was came up in terms of the top discussed themes/buzz clusters in relation to the Skype brand name.

Unsurprisingly, Skype is strongly associated with functions like Video Conferencing and Calls.

• Video Conferencing/Video Calls

• Mobile Phones: Given that mobile usage is increasing, the fact that Skype is often mentioned in conjunction with mobile phones isn’t all that surprising.

Phone Models discussed

• iPhone 4 /Apple iPhone : Interestingly enough, there were separate conversation themes for the iPhone 4 versus generic chatter on the Apple iPhone itself, possibly double the share of voice for the iPhone compared to other phone models.
• Windows Phone 7 : There was a previous rumour floating around that Skype wouldn’t be developing for the Windows Phone 7 but that has since been cleared up over at ZDNet Asia.
• HTC Touch
• BlackBerry
• Motorola

Communication Centric:

• SMS
• MSN
• Social Networking
• Facebook – Skype was also one of the top Web 2.0 brands often mentioned together with the likes of other communication options like MSN and Yahoo!.

“We have cellphones if its important, and email, IM and Skype if its not.” - a post from The Singaporum Forum.

Skype for “not important” calls. Issue or non issue?

“Erm i normally use skype to call my friends during gameplays… Not really used for overseas purposes. ” - Hardwarezone Forum.

While Skype might be utilized heavily by the overseas crowd ( I know I would!), it’s interesting to note that gamers might also be an alternative target audience in their messaging. Not something that immediately comes to mind.

_______________________________

Also saw that the Skype business solutions offering was given a counter of its own at the booth. Skype still seems to be resonating with the average consumer online, but it will be interesting to see how their branding might translate to serious enterprise customers, and the impact or effect, if any.

Full Disclaimer: All buzz clusters phrases were taken from Brandtology’s (where I work!) Digital Conversation Workbench.

Other official pictures from the event here! : Skype Twitter Accounts

I was at the HP #futureis event earlier this year, and there were many interesting presentations given by the various folk who shared. And yet, right now, while the whole Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare phenomenon has taken various parts of the world by storm, sometimes it easy to forget that there are many out there who still mainly stick to good old fashioned email, and surfing websites. So what constitutes this whole “social media” concept, anyway? It probably means different things to different people, and just when you think that you’re starting to understand the landscape, it moves again. We’re probably not even scratching the surface of what could possibly be done with all the information we have, and even trying to make sense of the upcoming trends in the scene.

Real time is so Yesterday; Predictive Analytics is the Now <?>

Last year around this time, the chatter was all about the real time phenomenon and how microblogging sites like Twitter could contribute to this. A year later, Twitter still surfaces in conversations, but now we’re looking into something that I’ve recently become very interested in – using past and present data to predict the future. Apparently, Twitter can even predict box office revenues of Hollywood movies, better than some established standards. All this is inherently fascinating to me, and something I’d love to explore more. The end of the research pretty much sums up the importance of this.

So effectively, this could apply to product launches, electorial campaigns (as the paper highlights) and all sorts of other CRM related issues.

What is Privacy?

On top of that, the definition of privacy continues to evolve as well. I’ll have to say that the behaviours linked to Foursquare still border on stalkerish creepy at times, and other sources like Facebook house such an incredible amount of (mostly accurate and genuine) data about demographics, user interests and the like, it’s seriously hard not to see this as a gold mine for marketers/advertisers. Imagine the conclusions that could be drawn from all this information.

What goes viral? Some good folk at UPenn/Wharton have published some research studying the list of the most emailed articles on the NYtimes that suggests that positive, rather than negative news is more viral (all those in PR can heave a sigh of relief) and that “useful” information is more likely to be shared, given that these could enhance connections with others. That goes for awe (inspiring) stories too. The generalizability of the results is a little suspect, given that it was largely confined to the readers of the NYtimes.com, and those who actually use the email function, but interesting nonetheless.

Share Prices & the Bottomline Another angle that has surfaced recently has been the effort to try and measure some real world impact of social media. We have the entire situation with Nestle and the impact of the Facebook debacle on it’s share prices. Zilch, at least according to this article. My sensing is that this is largely to do with the nature of the conversation. I do not deny it’s importance, but CSR for the most part, has been a tricky component to compute in terms of tangible profits. Perhaps it might have been different, should the issue have centered around an actual product, or service deficit. ROI is a tricky thing to nail down, one simplistic formula would probably not be able to encompass all the variables to be taken into account.

These are just some random musings that have come up… More about some other trends and thoughts on those in the next post!

Games

Ever contemplate disabling or deactivating your Facebook account? You know what is top of mind of users when they worry aloud in the FAQ section of FB about losing their data from Farmville (or any other FB game, really!). This, instead of losing all their friends and contacts. This was a few months ago, when Farmville concerns were right at the top of the discussion topics.

It will be interesting when the games and virtual goods segment in FB grows. The question then is how this will translate in markets like South Korea, where there is an entire virtual economy flourishing. It is also a market where other global players such as Myspace, Youtube and even Google have either had to bow out or simply be content with a smaller pie of the market share. Will FB finally have enough clout to go against the likes of Cyworld?

Another question is what happens when (and if?) app revenues surpass that of Facebook?

Zynga (creator of Farmville, Mafia Wars and etc) which has 230 million monthly active users was reported to have revenues of $200 million in 2009. The WSJ says Facebook revenues could hit $710 million in 2010, so there’s still some distance between the two figures. Still, if a fair percentage of return visits are due to the addictive FB games, it remains to be seen if the gap will narrow.

Facebook: Your One stop Internet Destination

You’ve seen the stats. Early 2009, Zuckerberg quipped the most overused quotable line about how “If Facebook were a country, it would be the eighth most populated in the world, just ahead of Japan, Russia and Nigeria.”

Then, he was talking about 150 million people. It is now 2010. Techcrunch reports that Facebook now has something along the lines of about 350 million registered users, with over 175 million of them logging in daily.

That’s a whole lot of visits, a whole lot of eyeballs, a whole lot of power.

Enough power to simply change the FB layout AGAIN without word or warning. I hated it, but have since gotten used to it, since there wasn’t anything much I could really do about it (deja vu?). Everyone seems to have gotten used to the fact that we are all experimental guinea pigs, sigh and get on with our lives. And we  still keep going back to the site.

And now, FB has its sights on Google, who apparently has 800 million visitors.

“According to Web measurement firm Compete Inc., Facebook has passed search-engine giant Google to become the top source for traffic to major portals like Yahoo and MSN, and is among the leaders for other types of sites.” – Source: SF Gate

You can also read more about how FB could kill Google here. The gist is that FB and Google are complementary for now (since FB is leading all those eyeballs to Google), at least, until unique visits for FB surpass that of Google. Microsoft last cut a (non exclusive)deal with FB in the last quarter of 2009 to include real time search results from status updates, but it remains unclear where FB may run with the search pie.

What are these sites to you?

Interestingly, at least for now, Google seems to resonate more with users in terms of the serious stuff – maps, translators, finance info, useful software like chrome/earth.. versus more of a slant towards entertainment and games on Facebook.

Many people still use the Google search bar as a place to type in URLs like Facebook.com (for reasons I can never fathom.. why they can’t type it directly into the actual URL bar is beyond me).

These results below do feature a bit on the importance of mobile as well – with the mobile related and FB lite mentions.

I’m still curious as to how all this will play out and how people will respond to all/any of these changes online… What will keep people coming back for repeat visits?  Also,  with all the talk on privacy and merging of identities on various platforms,  something to explore in future posts!

So one of the projects I’ve been working on….the APAC Digital Brand Index!
Edelman, together with Brandtology (where I work) have just released a APAC Digital Brand Index spanning across the major markets in the region. To quote John, “8 markets, 800,000 posts, 233 tech brands…” and then some <!>

Please show the team some love if you can because while this may come under the umbrella project of the DBI, multi-market projects really could be mini projects on their own (as is often the case). A full story can be found on the Edelman & Brandtology main sites. (This is where you get the media goodies like fact sheets & media releases, so I suggest you check it out!) and more on John’s site here.

There’s been some nice coverage so far, from online sites in Malaysia, India, China (post in chinese), more India, Australia, to publications like Marketing-interactive.com. I’ve heard the team from China had some great respones from the media session too!
And of course, there are scribd documents, youtube videos all over ( you don’t have to look too hard.)

It is pretty interesting to watch how the news grows. The Google bots are clearly doing their job. Early Friday morning, a Google search returned some 3-4 relevant hits top of page, but that has changed significantly now for any of the major search terms one might use to hunt this down. Search also turns up hits from Facebook pages pretty well too.

Across other spaces, the word is alive on Twitter…. it’s nice to see the multi lingual comments coming in.

I think some of the main findings are already nicely summarized in the various fact sheets on the Edelman site, but of course there are a whole lot more that the data set could provide. Off the top of my head:

• Online behavioural patterns of APAC netizens… ( 8 countries so far, 2 more coming out). This is for the psychology buff inside me somewhere. I’d really like to see if there are patterns of posting. Weekends are generally less buzzy (people apparently don’t post when they’re not at work?), with conversations happening mostly during weekdays. I can see all those questions about productivity popping up already!
• Behavioural patterns in different channels - Twitter, unsurprisingly ranks pretty highly in terms of activity and mentions of Brands in the DBI. Part of me thinks that this is largely due to the ease and low effort needed to do an update (aka people are lazy. Easier to post on Twitter than write a full blog post).
  If you’re holding a smartphone, armed with the great Twitter applications and a mobile data plan, it’s easy to make a habit out of Twitter. Instead of calling up our best friend to rant about the lousy brand experience you’d just had, the whole world is now your audience. Clearly, we are seeing signs of that happening, given the number of rants that seem to originate from Twitter.

• Virality of a Brand – is a certain brand name confined within a select few channels? and why? What’s the difference between a brand that enjoys a lot of buzz within a limited number of channels, as compared to one that is widely disscussed across multiple platforms, but in less depth.
  As a brand, which would you rather be and why? Is this what people call “reach”?
  Does mere reach ( my brand is discussed by 100000 people but each of them only talks about me once ) mean more than longevity in conversation ( my brand is discussed continually by 100 people, across a period of months )?

• Between a brand and an iconic product – The Singapore data shows Singtel topping the list of mentions. This is probably correlated somewhat with the fact that they still (at this moment in time anyway) have a monopoly on the iphone market. It’s interesting that probably Apple is not mentioned as a brand itself much, but it’s hugely successful line of products – the iPhone, iMac, Macbook, MBPs, MacOS etc would probably generate a huge amount of conversations. Maybe Apple is an aspirational brand, but i personally hate the iPhone because I can’t type on it (yes, seriously). How does brand loyalty feature then, and does it even matter anymore? Would you place product function over the brand, or do you like to convince yourself that this is so?
• Influencers – What is the difference between an online influencer who owns a blog, and say, someone who’s really active on Twitter? In a forum? In which forum? And how would you qualify this? Microblogging and forums clearly win hands down in terms of activity, as compared to blogs (Again, back to the fact that blogging is hard work!).

Endless questions of why, how, etc and I could really go on and on…

But really, if you’re a slice and dice data wizard, it would be cool to find out what else I could have missed! Any major angles?

If you’re a practioner in Communications/PR/Marketing, it would be great to hear what matters in your daily projects, what are the kinds of metrics and measurements that are important to you and why? How would any of these feature in your social media/digital strategies?
PM me or drop a comment here! I’m decidedly curious.

Tags: digitalbrandindex, brandtology, edelman, APAC, DBI, measurement, analytics, research, asiapacific,

The Apple folk just have a way of making normal features seem heaven sent. While people are pumping R&D into increasing megapixels, shiny new hardware designs (wow! 10 colours to choose from), Apple have managed to make a 2+ mega pixel camera phone (that still seems a tad bit laggy if you ask me) into the TOP camera phone on Flickr. Also, they made picking colours seem so yesterday (like the first generation candy coloured imacs).  I can only imagine the gap between the ubiquitous iPhone and it’s other competitors from Nokia and Blackberry will widen, given that Flickr is coming to the App store.

Clear market leader!

Top camera phone is not interesting on it’s own, given that in most cities, within a 3 m radius on the train, one can probably spot at least one Iphone user. Given that most of them will probably be on data plans, this naturally leads to a lot more submissions from the hardware in question.

What is more interesting is that …on Flickr, the iPhone has been comparing pretty decently against the Canon EOS Digital Rebel XTi. Now that, is a flipping DSLR from Canon, ten megapixel and all sorts of other great features thrown in….but the graph below shows the slowly dipping popularity of the Canon Xti. Compared against the rising love from netizens holding an iPhone, Apple isn’t doing too shabbily at all.  The iphone is also the only cameraphone in the Most Popular Cameras mix.

*I wish the horizontal axis from the Flickr graph had some dates thrown in, so we could correlate that sharp spike with the release of the Iphone 3Gs, hypothetically or otherwise.

All this has some connotations for the camera market. Given that Flickr is (in my impression at least),  a great community of artists and photographers who range from amateur, semi professional to professional, I do wonder how product lines will evolve in future. What will happen to the cameras that are in between (neither the powerful DSLRs for the serious photographers, nor quite as handy and functional as a camera phone)?

On another note, I have my thoughts about the interesting correlation between handset monopolies (aka sole iphone telco providers around the world) and bad customer service. But I will save them for another day.

An interesting angle was brought up in a recent conversation, that piqued my interest in the relationship between the general level of brand loyalty and the media channels that exist today. The hypothesis is that with the decline of traditional media (or the ability to target the masses with a few major channels with the same type of content), brand loyalty will continue to drop.

This made me very curious. It is true that a whole myriad of channels exist today, creating all sorts of issues for marketers and advertisers who now face the daunting task of having to allocate limited resources in trying to reach their target consumers. The effect of a campaign then effectively gets diffused, and consumers don’t develop any particular preferences for brands like they did before.

Then again, it is possible that brand loyalty has been subtly replaced by function. I don’t really care what brand a product is, as long as it serves its function. There are some people who belong to this camp anyhow.

And then there is the recent catch phrase, “Stop Campaigning, start committing”…. on modern brand building.

Such are the random thoughts that are floating around…well that, and the fact that I’ve suddenly realized the number of subscribers to this blog has jumped over a 100 to 114 right now according to the feed stats. It’s kind of an honour I suppose, that a certain number of people are actually interested in what you have to say.

Also, Google still rules the (feed) world because most of you are coming in from some Google platform, one way or another. I suppose this will continue, until RSS cloud somehow muscles in on their territory. The telling paragraph from this link reads :

Now RSSCloud has a posse. Half a million blogs are created each month on WordPress and if Google Reader keeps taking its sweet time checking those blogs for updates instead of turning on support for RSSCloud, it’s going to look slow as molasses.

Trying to figure out exactly what this new offering does ( and wondering how google will counter this), but I’m still not -quite- getting the full picture….

Tags: brandbuilding, brandloyalty, marketing, product, sales,