WediaBuzz

Sat through a Disney presentation today - man are they awesome.  They are doing some cool stuff. 

For the teens they are building in functionality that allows them to customize desk top (click and drag approach) and allows teens to do a million things at once (kids can task like this) like watch video, listen to music, play games… Also building a protective social network. 

For 6-10 year olds they are building a social network with the profile being a fairie - check it out http://disney.go.com/fairies/

They don’t forget the parents http://family.go.com/.  Here they target moms mainly with topics from recipes, travel and family tips to coupons.  I know there are PAC projects targeting these areas - thought this might be helpful. 

TB

 A common theme I heard throughout the day was that we need to understand who our customers are and what they want.   Many ways this can be done, but social networks appear to be the best way to collect data regarding customers.  A lot of emphasis was put on understanding the problem and getting our users involved in creating the solution.  We would have more success if we stopped creating ideas that we think will work and get our community involved.   Exciting times are ahead and the more we involve our customers the better the solution and our success.

Consumer 2.0: How web 2.0n is changing moods, metrics and monetization was a discussion with Raef Needleman and a panel of experts.  Consumers will ever change.  We need to increase 2 way communication and understand that conversation is content…How can we do this? They discussed the fragmentation of the web and this makes it difficult for advertisers to purchase.  They discussed technology and how it is changing and in their opinion think the technology to watch is mobile, widgets and blogs.  They think searching is here to stay.  Consumers are not just wondering around – they know what they want and do not always know where to find it.  Web makes it easy to get “another view” and search plays a key role in this.  Search will continue to make branding difficult, but if you know who your customer is you can help your advertisers get the return they are looking for.  Brands can also tie into search by offering solutions – Consumers not looking for tide stick, just looking for ways to get the stain out.   A move needs to be made from demo based advertising to interest/ social based.  Stressed the sooner you can collect and connect consumers interests to advertisers the more opportunities you will have. My space does a very good job of collecting and leveraging this info.  POWER IS IN THE DATA!  We need more consumer DATA

Web 2.0 feature adoption- 95% to video, 85% to browse most popular, 66% to social networks, 56% to subscribe, 40% posts blogs, 31% access mobile, 35% use tag clouds (user generated tags) 80% of clicks done by 16% of the people and 30% -42% of users delete cookies.

Rael Dornfest talked about email marketing and how powerful this can be if done right.  Main points he focused on were :

·         Deliverability issues – don’t abuse!

·         Engagement is the cornerstone of email marketing’s value to a business. All the things we love about the channel exist to support and foster engagement with brands. Email is cost effective, relatively real time, and it is ubiquitous — it is continually ranked as the number one Internet activity performed. People spend more time answering email during a day than they do using any other channel, surpassing browsing the Internet and even watching television.

·   From a business perspective, email engagement can be classified as the ability of a brand to reach consumers over a given lifecycle and reinforce the values extended in this brand connection. It takes on many levels though and email is a facilitator.

·         We must remember one thing about customer engagement and email: there is a finite group of consumers that will truly engage with you through email and some, only in degrees. Our job is to find those people, foster the relationship, optimize the cadence of our communications and help our clients understand the worth it has for their business.

Jeff Berkier discussed Emerging ad Exchanges – bidding on banners and beyond.   As an industry non premium inventory is abundant and sells at a fraction of the cost as premium.  We often give it away.  As we move forward non premium display and social banners will be bought and sold in a biddable marketplace.  This would be a place where consumers would identify who they want to reach and purchase inventory accordingly.  This is a different than the ad network.  The exchange would bring buyer and seller together in an automated billable, efficient way. 

Key note speaker – Tim O’reilly

Deep trends –

·         internet is a deep platform

·         Harnessing collective intelligence

·         Data as the intel inside

·         Software above the level of a single device

·         Software as a service

Areas of opportunity –

·         Collective intelligence – gets better with constant interaction, mining of data and real time interface.  Find meaning in data and turn into interface services. 

·         2.0 evolves into cloud computing and the internet .  Be a part of the info and database.

·         Data everywhere – censors in tires to determine pressure…where else is their data that our consumers want to see?

It’s all about the consumer!  I would be happy to share all of my notes if interested.

All for today – Borelli Out!

In the morning I sat in a session that discussed web start up.  The main focus of this session was geared towards new startup companies.  There were some good ideas presented that we could look at when creating new consumer solutions.  According to Rob Hayes when designing new ideas we must ask a few questions:

·         why this and why now?

·         What is the Problem being solved and value to the customer?

Example – Mint money.  Designed to manage money easily .  Replaced  Quicken in many levels.

·         Market size - who is targeted demographic?  How many potential users?   What is it going to take to get to the total projected revenue?  Think through numbers and think through real potential. 

·         Value to customer – Determine this and market to target audience.

·         Required skill set – Important for the site design to match skill set of demographic.

In the morning I also attended a session on Free traffic with social media.  How can we as a media company use blogs, social news, social networking and online video to leverage traffic?  This is low cost high return, high impact.  Stephan Spencer also talked about creating easy opportunities to share information.  All info should include an email to a friend link.  He also shared   http://www.netconcepts.com.  This  looked like a good site to visit regarding SEO.   

Afternoon session was on Experience driven product strategies by Todd Wilkens.  Lots of great info – below are a few key thoughts.

1.       The Experience is the product!   - We need to understand the users experience and define the logic and data from here.  Outside in approach vs data to user. 

2.       Experience strategy

Don’t use feature matrix to build strategy – competitors have x so let’s build this as well.

A better approach is to look at consumers needs and what is being missed… have strategy built in stages so you have a clear idea of how your product will evolve.  Important not to overwhelm with functionality out of the gates.

Example -

Customers needs when it comes to photos.

Capture     Upload        Storage     Viewing     edit    sharing  printing         

CVS, Walgreens does best with printing

Kodak did good job of upload and storage – sharing weak

FLIKR – saw an opportunity with sharing.  Focused on where others were missing.  As we create new experiences, we need to really define what are the customer’s needs?  Why do they come to us?  What do they want to see?  How is our offering different than any other?  Build an “elevator pitch” will help answer these questions – fill in the blanks: Product is for ______, who are dissatisfied with (or interested in) ____________.  Our product/ service is ___________ that provides____________ unlike _______(the alternatives/competitors)

Another approach – Create a list under each question below.

 Who is service for?         What is the Service?       Why is this compelling? How distinct?

All for today, looking forward to tomorrow.

Borelli out!