Why the Mixi Twitter Relationship is Bigger Than we Think

November 30th, 2011, In Social Media, by Beverly Crandon

The Mixi Twitter arrangement that broke via press conference late last week was overlooked by many, but deeper analysis of what this means to Twitter, or what it would have meant to any western company, is quite immense.  For years, popular North American organizations have tried to make inroads in the Asian market, but found themselves up against cultural nuances and mostly large home grown, ‘like’ companies.  So, some western companies gave up before even trying or tied and realized they needed to give up.  Take Google and China search for example.  Though the example may be a little far reaching, it does address the fact that taking a western approach to a business model that is supposed to excel on continents found on the other side of the world, just does not work.

Many may argue that if partaking in another market means bending on your business model and strategy, it just isn’t worth it, but for others, the connected population is too large to ignore.  If you fall into the bucket of those that cannot just turn away from what a market with so many connected residents can mean to your technology enterprise or service, then in our minds, the best way to break-in, is through partnership.  This is exactly what Twitter was able to do in Japan, with it’s Mixi partnership.  I argue, it was a much needed move, given that Facebook beat them to a partnership in China, with Baidu.

Mixi is a social networking site founded and launched in Japan, in 2004.  By 2008 it had an 80% market share in the social arena and today,

according to Burson – Martseller, it is still the social network of record in Japan. Take these numbers and compare it to Facebooks marginal 2%+ share in the market.  Nonetheless, it is argued today by some that Twitter could be just as strong, if not stronger than Mixi in terms of popularity.  We’ve seen Twitter be responsible for major entertainers losing large endorsement contracts, in Japan, due to alleged malicious tweets that have caused mass histeria – this alone highlights the popularity of Twitter in Japan.  So, with Twitter understanding that to keep relevant in the Japanese market, it needed a partnership with a home grown brand that users loved and most of all trusted, and with Mixi  realizing Twitter’s popularity as somewhat of a threat, the partnership represents a mutually beneficial relationship.

The agreement, to start, sees the two companies joining forces on an an app. called Mixixmas.  The app. will come with the built in ability to allow Mixi users to syndicate content to Twitter.  From what we can see, the app. focuses on the holiday season, wish lists and gifting. This upcomming holdiay season is also the first of such endeavors for the two.  On a more serious note, Mixi and Twitter will team up to find ways to aid Japanese citizens in communicating during pressured times, such as what we saw with the use of Twitter, during the Japanese earthquake.

For Twitter, this move to partner with Japan’s Mixi will keep the other North American platforms, namely Facebook, at bay, making themselves and YouTube the only social platforms from abroad mainting headway and growth in Japan’s social arena.

Header image courtesy of: feedmerobotfood

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Jeff Jarvis at Toronto’s Third Tuesday – Introducing Public Parts

November 18th, 2011, In Must Share, Online Publishing, by Beverly Crandon

Last nights, Third Tuesday event, on a Thursday mind you, in Toronto, was one I could not miss.  The nights speaker was Jeff Jarvis, someone I admire given his multi-faceted background, which encompasses both traditional and new media.  Nonetheless, his talk was not just centred around getting Canadian’s familiar with Mr. Jarvis and his views , but also to promote his latest book Public Parts.  Given the book’s theme, much of his talk surrounded privacy and what it really means, from a global perspective.  His global discussion was much welcomed, as often times speakers focus on US positioning and forget that the rest of us exist.

Jarvis referenced his bout with prostate cancer and how he made his plight public, to aid or in certain support of others going through the same thing.  While communicating about his personal  health matter, he shared a funny story in which he was verbally castrated by someone who thought he should not be sharing this type of information on the public web, much less syndicate it using social media. Javis’ response was a colourful ‘f-you’.  The ‘aha’ moment here was when Jarvis asked the audience why society put such a stigma on discussing health, and health was used as just one example, but the question can be asked to many who move to limit openness.  In the end, he chalked it up to fearing a loss of control.  ’If I share this information which was once deemed private, I am relinquishing control over a part of my life that was once protected’.

 

Jeff Jarvis did say that he believes that not everything that we do should be shared, at which point he referenced Twitter and our many misuses of it –  ”what we had for breakfast”.   With that being said, he did push for a majority openness, as, the way he put it, “being open helps us all”.

He closed his talk by saying this, that he thought the Internet as we know it today, is still in it’s infancy.  There is much learning and transformations still in store.  His concern was that if we moved to control something that we do not yet know the full potential of, we as a society, could be manacling our ability to utilise the Net for good and in ways we haven’t yet conceived of.  After that bit, you couldn’t help but think, he does have a point!

What are your thoughts on privacy and openness?

 

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Age Old Question Still Lives: how to digitize your editorial newsroom…

November 17th, 2011, In Newspapers, Online Journalism, Print Media, by Beverly Crandon

For those of you who have been on both sides of publishing content, print versus Web, the age old question of how news content should be treated in today’s digital market, is an old one.  However, what’s old for those of us who have been living the double-edged sword, is still very new and very pressing to others.  Today, for example, I came across an article that was addressing a Detroit newspaper groups Managing Editor’s trials and tribulations, as she tries to move her editorial staff through to incorporate digital reporting, in their story suite.  Quite naturally, and as I have seen in the past, this Managing Editor is coming up against opposition, where her editorial staff haven’t yet drank the Kool Aid.  To them, adding the social media tasks to their list of things to do, when covering a story is too mundane, tedious and again to them, damn near impossible, given all of their other responsibilities.  When I first read the Managing Editors point of view, the view of one of her editorial staff and lastly the gentleman who wrote the all encompassing article, I was surprised that these conversations still existed, given all that we’ve learned about social media today and the consumer interaction levels with it.  At one point in the article, the writer makes reference to the social media tasks that the Managing Editor is asking her staff to do, as setting up the group to give away all of the newspapers content, and then some, online, making the printed edition obsolete.  News flash … the peril of the print newspaper has nothing to do with the tasks the editorial staff is being asked to do, it has to do with the choices now available for the public to consume information.  The worst thing a newspaper could do is cut itself off of an obviously publicly accepted information source – social media.

We here support the Detroit newspaper groups Managing Editor in her efforts, but we do think she has missed the mark in one area.  Social Media and its effective use can seem somewhat daunting to the average person, especially when you’re asking them to use it in a professional sense.  Given this, not everyone will embrace it – it’s something new that for them outside of posting pictures of their vacation or latest addition to the family, its other uses appear foreign.  This newspaper group should look at staff aptitude.  Are they asking the wrong employee profile to assume these tasks?  Are they setting them up for failure, if the digital Web isn’t something they grasp?  Instead of asking why her incumbent staff isn’t on board with social media, she should be asking who would be.  What does the ideal reporter look like in this digital age? What experience and background would they need to come equipped with?  What tools should they have already used to be a part of a digital editorial team?  Stop harping on the ones who refuse to commit and start working on building a team of editorial staff who work to usher your paper and digital divisions forward, in our ever changing digital world.

We strongly believe that there is still room for both printed news and digital news and the folks who will succeed will apply the right balance and remove any content protectionist  plans.  The bottom line is, if you refuse to offer the information digitally, your readers will utilize other Web sources to find it.  Thinking that by hiding the content behind a ‘walled garden’ with a smile will be enough to protect your product road map and growth plan will be enough, is a sure fire way to set you up for demise.

You can read Michelle Rogers’ viewpoint here, the Managing Editor we’ve made reference to above.

 

Featured image above courtesy of: alancleaver_2000

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Think Lemon Wedge: there is often beauty in simplicity

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November 4th, 2011, In Business, Design, Software, Strategy, by Beverly Crandon

A few weeks ago, I invited a few friends over for dinner and cocktails, with the highlight of the evening being a new cocktail I had created  You see, I specifically went to bar tending school, not so I can work in the local bar (mind you, if there is any truth to the tech bubble I

guess I do have a skill to fall back on, when I move to the South of France), but so that I could entertain appropriately.  Conjure up concoctions with unassuming ingredients, making a libation that my guests would talk about for weeks.  Nonetheless, and back to the story, a few weeks ago I was featuring one of these libations, which I decided required a lemon and lime wheel.  Now in bar tending school, there was a third of a class spent on garnishing, but really… I didn’t pay attention.  I remember thinking to myself, the garnish means nothing to me – it’s what’s in the glass that counts.  So I, proceeded to crack jokes in class and take part in idle chatter, during the garnishing session.  So,

bringing us back to today, this new libation that just must have a lemon and lime wheel, was in a pickle.  Believe it or not, I could not get the perfect circular shape I was looking for and the pieces I did cut, didn’t sit on the rim of the glass in the perfect way I had envisioned.  I then decided to stop worrying about the garnish, and I started to concern myself with the taste of the drink.  I tried it, and it was delightful – and actually came out better than the practise batch I had made the week prior.  So, I was happy with the drink, but not the garnish.

Friends started to arrive and I pulled out the evenings signature drink.  I watched them all look at the garnish and fumble with it as it fell either on the floor or in their drink directly.  They too then looked past the garnish and sipped the drink.  Their response was more than pleasing and the amount of returns to the signature drink tray, proved that their love of the drink wasn’t just lip service.  Nonetheless, I slowly started to notice that folks just started to take the lemon and lime wheels and place them directly in the drink.  To them, what was more important was adding that touch of lime or lemon to the cocktail and not so much the rimming of the drink.  It was then I realized that the 99% of us are interested in the basic art of the featured item.  The garnish, tinsel and diamond we in the industry think an item must have, aren’t necessarily the things that will make the 99% appreciate and love what we produce.  This rule of what the 99% want in order to become advocates, does not just apply to technology, marketing and libations, it really does apply to all industry verticals.

I urge you to think Lemon Wedge, when venturing down your next design or product path. Is your product light on functionality, but heavy on garnish?

 

Header image courtesy of: Red Door Creative

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Hashtag Experiment: how our audience assessment turned into a lesson learned

November 2nd, 2011, In Advertising, Entrepreneurs, Social Media, by Beverly Crandon

Today, we had the pleasure of being asked to speak at one of Toronto’s foremost entertainment collegiates, Trebas Institute.  The instructors thought was that they were teaching one of their classes how to market themselves or the artist brands they represent and to be more forward thinking than the music industry has been pegged as being in the past, they decided including digital marketing to the syllabus was an acute move – hence our inclusion.

Days prior to the talk, we asked specific questions about the students in the class, to try to peg our audience and pre-determine, to some extent, how these folks already use digital devices, blogs and social media. Yes, we applied some of the persona building strategies to this talk, as we would when setting out on a branding strategy.  We assumed a few things going in:

• Knowing that the class consisted of mostly Gen Y’ers, we assumed that they were very connected, digitally
• We assumed that they were actively using things like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube, in their personal lives
• We assumed that some of them had already started playing with Fan Pages for their professional brands
• We assumed that some of them had already started playing with things like hashtags on Twitter

We decided that based on our above assumptions and the fact that we were talking to the class about maximizing their exposure online and through other digital devices that we would integrate the very tools we would be chatting about, in class. On the day of the talk, we asked the class to either use their computers or smartphones freely in the class and post, using a specified hashtag on Twitter, burning questions they hoped to have answered from our time together and or any other thoughts they come up with during the session.  We promised to then check the hashtag at the end of the session, and ensure we’d covered all they wanted and or talk about the posted items during the open Q&A period.  Our intent behind the hashtag exercise was to obviously show the class, how many of these tools could be used to complete common offline activities, we had once done in other ways.  We wanted to show them how communications methods had expanded to include many awesome platforms.  Sounds good right?  Well, that’s what we thought too, until we reviewed the hashtag at the end of the session.  Although we spent time explaining the reason for the hashtag and how to enter the hashtag phrase, the class didn’t use it.  When asked why they didn’t, they said things like “I’ve never used hashtags on Twitter before”; “I never knew until today what #hashtags were”; “I just signed up for Twitter”.  When asked about the session overall we had comments like “This makes sense.  I have got a lot here that I can use for my business” or even keenly put “I am going to put this in motion tonight”.  So it wasn’t that they didn’t get the information imparted to them or didn’t embrace it, their mind sets were shaped to think in a different way.  Give me a moment and I will further explain that last point. Now, for some facilitators this would have been deflating – seen as a debacle, but not for us.  It was a great highlight and accent point on a lot of what we talked about, around digital marketing, which was having a plan before you execute.  How is your brand to be perceived? Who are you talking to? What do you know about them? What platforms do they use? etc….  Remember our persona assumptions above?  It was a solid list and for any other group with the same age and geographical profile, it would have worked, but one thing we missed was that the students were aspiring music industry moguls and like those before them, the digital side of their business provides less of a concern to them, while in the planning stage.  That industry propels so many other faucets as ‘must do’ and ‘must have’ that go to market strategies often tier the Web to a lower position. You, see we used our general data sets and understanding about that demographic, but did not use the specifics, the thing that makes them different – the music industry factor.  So again, it wasn’t that they didn’t get the information imparted to them or didn’t embrace it, their mind sets were shaped to think in a different way.

In closing and on a good note, these students are more digitally tuned than those in the music industry before them and the questions and comments from this group in today’s session, tell us that with the changing of the guard, we’ll continue to see transformations in this industry and more avantgarde decisions being made.  The very fact that the school has included digital into their curriculum says a lot.

So today,  the students learned some kick-ass strategy and we here at ad-ition learned that there can, by chance, be a caveat in your persona strategy that you didn’t think of before hand and rinse and repeat, is every marketers (teachers :=)) best friend.

Share with us your stories of real-world and digital world experiments you’ve embarked on.  Your lesson’s learned would be fruitful to many.

 

Header image courtesy of:  Robert Griffith

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