I’ve been meaning to write about this for a while now: after seeing the latest story in the Scrabulous legal row, I strongly believe that Scrabulous can only be good for Scrabble’s brand equity. Shane Richmond, the Telegraph’s tech ed has already argued that Scrabulous could have been partly responsible for increased sales of Scrabble board games, by effectively doing something that Hasbro’s’ marketing team should arguably have thought of in the first place; namely, making a social media version of their own game and giving a connected global community of global fans a platform from which to play each other and build positive word-of-mouth about the Scrabble brand.
And here are the Agarwal brothers throwing them a freebie!
If I was Hasbro’s CMO, I’d want to acquire Scrabulous and pay the Agarwal bros to create more games that are deliberately closer to the original brand. I’d use Facebook as my initial seeding ground to grow my community and suck them all off onto my proprietary social network by informing the Facebook gamers about nationwide and global league Scrabble champion competitions on my home-grown network. I really think they’ve missed a trick. Here’s another story looking at how Hasbro’s decision could really negatively impact their business.
I suppose what I’m suggesting is fairly similar in terms of logic to this story; which puts forward the idea that in some limited instances, small levels of intellectual property infringement may arguably be beneficial to a large brand in the longer term.* Although in this case the benefit isn’t about being able to price your product at higher levels, and more about getting someone else to build new and younger groups of game enthusiasts for you.
*I’m not an advocate of software piracy myself, though
Just got ReadWriteWeb’s top 1o digital media product lists off my Twitter stream this eve. For anyone who wants breaking tech news fast and is not yet on Techupdates and Techwatching, I’d definitely recommend both. They’re dangerously addicitive though. At a time where everyone’s trying to predict the future and talking about how different technologies will react to the ‘old crunch’, I was happy to recieve this. I like the fact that they’ve gone for some unusual and unsung heroes of the web2.0 space, like Ning and Kiva. I noticed Teachstreet were in there too under top 10 real world apps. I wonder if School of Everything would have been in there if RWW was UK based?
It’s trend forceasting time at the Guardian’s tech team as they publish a list of their top 100 sites for the future. As they themselves point out, many of the sights that have made their list didn’t even exist in 2006 (the year when they compiled their previous list), which does prompt questions about how long many of them will last. For me the question of whether they do last is less of an issue than whether they were built with that intention in the first place.
I was immediately reminded of this Fastcompany article about built-to-flip companies, and the new entrepreneurial attitude that the aim of creating a new service is to be able to sell it when its user base reaches critical mass, usually to larger companies that can then mine all of that juicy data they’ve collated, or to start building paid for services into the initial model.
Personally I think many of these new companies whose models are based around collaboration, social networking or online communications will be rushing to get bought over the next 12 months; others that have a viable mobile proposition may last longer (mainly because of positive market projections for the mobile content market over the next few years) and dedicate resources into building up the mobile web friendly side of their businesses. It definitely looks like that’s the way Facebook is going with its mobile app-to-hardware ‘tie-ins’.
The move to mobile would be great for ‘life-hack’Â web 2.0 tools like Qype or Openstreetmap. I wonder if they’ll take that route?
I’ve spotted an interesting post by Stuart Glendinning Hall, commenting on the effectiveness of using Twitter to ‘crowdsource’ answers to stuff. I’ve experienced this personally when trying to drive a blogmeme or tweet-based game before you’ve warmed up the people on your Tweetstream. My attempted #myQRcodes game, while attracting blogger comments didn’t fly on Twitter like I wanted it to because I effectively launched it ‘cold’, if you see what I mean.
You’ll see this rule on this post and also here: on Twitter you have to give and give and give before you get. Giving (in the form of replies, directs, and other forms of visible interest in other people’s Tweeted content) is what you do to make yourself more ‘famous’. Unless of course, you are a celeb that tweets, in which case people will come to you anyway.
I should of course say this is not about having a contrived schmoozing strategy; it’s more about pushing out great content yourself and speaking to other people about content that engages you on the level of passion and interest. Then one day you maye become a microcelebrity, or maybe even real one!
Oh and look at this cool low-tech video about Twitter. Cool huh?
I’ve just been alerted to this FreshNetworks blog post about one effect of the nascent ’social media revolution’ (I use that term tentatively) on the employment market. Community managers are going to be increasingly in demand, as organisations see the benefits of being tapped into what online communities are saying and are interested in. Although ReadWriteWeb is tracking a growth in demand within US markets (so we should be fairly prudent on second-guessing how this trend will filter into the UK market) it’s nonetheless a good sign for a group of professionals that are relatively unknown within the employment market at the moment. I know through my own conversations that Freshminds and PFJ are the only recruitment consultancies that I’ve known to get briefed on CM jobs so far; the rest of them tend to be advertised through private networks like this one.
I believe that having dedicated community managers within a marketing and PR team would be very helpful in terms of helping people take their eyes off ‘getting the product to the community’ and focussing more on tailoring what a company does have to offer to what the customer genuinely wants. Futurelab has a great presentation on this,which is here.
I couldn’t help but to mention this when I saw it: now you can wear QR codes containing information about your blog, a youtube clip of you on holiday, or even your Facebook profile using a patch like this from these people. It’s also scannable using an iPhone, so you could (if you wanted to) publicise your blog as you wonder around to anyiPhone-owning pal you had. I’m waiting for the scarves myself.
Right. After seeing Wadds’ blog post on how dot matrix bar codes may be reaching their tipping point, I had a play with the QR code generator to see what what the QR code for my blog looked like. Here it is! Let’s see yours too. Oh and be sure to add #myQRcode as a hashtag so I can hunt you down on Twittersearch.
For those who are wondering what on earth i’m talking about, QR (or quick response) codes are small, square-shaped barcodes that consist of up to half a webpage of data. This technology was initially meant for for tracking parts in vehicle manufacturing but has found its way into the consumer mobile sector, as an information tagging application.
And because it looks pretty cool too as a design its also making its way into the fashion field. If I was at a company like Spreadshirt, I’d devise a campaign around people designing T-shirts that included QR codes on things of personal interest to each entrant, such as their blogs, local news, or a message they wanted to send to the world. Or maybe it could feature in a personalised messaging campaign for a mobile phone company?
I’ve blogged before about how while 2007 was the big year when ecological sustainability conversations really gained ground amongst society’s mainstream influencers; the next stage in this conversation is people flying the flag for what I’m calling ‘holistic sustainability’. This is the consideration of the environmental, financial and psychological impacts of what do as parts of a company, or as individuals. The article that has prompted this blog is here. It’s only eye-catching to me as I’ve not seen much in the mainstream media about this kind of conversation yet; but I’ll definitely be keeping a keen eye from now onwards.
London South Bank University made a step into uncharted territories this Wednesday, after announcing the UK’s first social media BA course. In what appears to be a bid to fill the ’skills gap’ in that area, the three-year honours degree will help students to:
…obtain valuable experience in how to manage these technologies and to help others use them to their full potential. For example, you might learn how to manage a forum and moderate it, how to deal with issues like flaming and spamming, and how to get a work force to share and develop documents together. There are many new and challenging opportunities for jobs in this developing sector where expertise is still scarce.
Now while it would have been ideal for this course to exist at least four years ago, it’s heartening to see that there are some institutions that are finally listening to the market. I also appreciate that it would have probably been the result of a ‘war of attrition’ against traditionalists who may not have seen the merits of courses of this kind. I’m sure that (as with media studies) disparaging terms like ‘mickey mouse course’ may be bandied around; but with work trends like those seen on this video, educational institutions that don’t help students compete in the knowledge economy only stand to lose ground on the longer to innovative organisations like this, who by their social nature will likely stay ahead of the curve.
Thanks to Stuart Glendinning Hall for the tip! Personally I’d love to do a Ludology MA, but on pervasive gaming… the closest thing I can find to what I want is in Northumbria. Bit of a commute!
I’m not a small business owner, but I’m very interested in seeing who is from the perspective of eyeing the new biz landscape for nascent trends. If anyone else is coming to this do let me know.
