SocialTV and Emerging Platforms Overview

I was invited to speak to Hollywood marketing executives on June 26, 2012 at the iMedia Entertainment Summit by Brad Berens and Nancy Galanty of DMG Events. The initial request was for an overview of up and coming along with more established companies in the SocialTV space. I’m far more interested in emerging platforms than the individual companies, although I admire and enjoy the entrepreneurship, vision and camaraderie of their leaders. As an angel investor or strategic partner I might invest capital or resources in the individual company, but in my agency role I’m infinitely more interested in the convergence of technologies and consumer trends that launch new behaviors and platforms into popular culture. As a result, I framed the presentation this way:

• Overview/Intro/Definition
• Underlying influences and market dynamics that make SocialTV compelling
• Proposed a spectrum of engagement models for nascent, volatile and emerging platforms like SocialTV

Some key take aways:

• SocialTV may become the new normal for consuming video versus a discrete space–the term “SocialTV” may go away
• According to Nielsen’s Q1 2012 report almost 90% of Smartphone and Tablet owners use their devices while watching TV; about 40% do so daily and over 60% do so several times a week. Conclusion: you can’t talk about SocialTV without the context of mobile which is where the greatest innovation will happen outside of the box
• SocialTV is currently comprised of content discovery and companion apps–think a better remote control or check-in and chatter–as well as analytics applied around TV content
• There are dozens if not hundreds of companies chipping away at pieces of this space but only a few are top-of-mind brands–Miso, Get Glue, IntoNow, Viggle, TrendRR, Bluefin and a few network offerings were like USA Chatter and HBOGo–mentioned at the conference of Hollywood insiders and Execs
• There’s a lot of interest in this space as it represents massive potential shifts in consumer and advertising revenues for Hollywood, marketers, SocialMedia companies along with emerging players able to capitalize on the expanding ecosystem
• For consumers, the opportunity to engage with families, friends and networks may unlock the social aspects of SocialTV and usher in the return from our Entertainment or TV room to the Family Room

Below is the slideware prepared for the presentation, followed by the video which has much more nuance and information with some reference links to close this post:

Slides with voiceover:

Curated links in preparation for the presentation:

http://delicious.com/marksilva/socialtv

Special thanks to Nielsen along with Adam Broitman, Adam Burg, Mark Ghuneim, Jeff Minsky and Lori Schwartz for their input and advice informing the presentation.

Weekly Round-Up w/o 5/16/11

Social Media

• 33% of Facebook postings done from mobile devices.
• Facebook announced that its insights analytics would be available for regular websites.  Here’s how to set it up.
• Take the Booz/ Buddy Media survey on social media
• New rules from Facebook on contest fight spam and have implications for marketers.

Your Content

• Location-based services are potentially great sources of content marketing.
• Curate your content with these top 20 websites.

Trend Lunch

Each month Anthem San Francisco hosts a Trend Lunch to share trends in culture, marketing and design. Here are some highlights  from last week’s lunch:

• QR codes in shoes takes you to video of shoes being fabricated.
• Terrible brand message & marketing, good functional product delivery but weak  marketing concept with “energy strips.”

Miscellaneous

• 39% of U.S. smartphone users check in.
• Kiip gives brands the opportunity to reach gamers right where they live at the critical point of engagement.
• Jonathan Salem’s good points on Progressive’s user/tech smarts running into old-ad Gimmicks
• Groupon’s “do or die moment.”
• My favorite session during the Social Loco conference.
• Where do developers invest their time?  Flurry presents apps by the numbers (slideshare)

Weekly Round-Up 5/9/11

Social|Local|Mobile –SoLoMo

• Groupon’s fast ascension to establish and lead the deals space is challenged with the introduction of Facebook Deals and other established incumbent entrants such as Yahoo! And AT&T Interactive.  Where Groupon has to rely on paid acquisition for new email and socialgraph distribution to drive demand and activation, Facebook Deals owns those channels for 600mm worldwide. Hard to compete with “free” or sunk costs. Other Incumbents like Yahoo! And AT&T Interactive can leverage sophisticated email marketing intellectual property and systems along with other forms of communications and relationships built into their existing businesses.
• Here’s how Facebook’s thinking about deals—something between friends
• Facebook begins paying users to watch advertisements because of low banner click-through rates.
• Today, 17% of mobile users are using location-based apps, or 70mm+ of projected 2011 smartphone & tablet users.  Half of these people are concerned about privacy, but can these be mitigated by greater transparency, utility and even value-exchange dynamics we’re seeing from the deals space?

BTW, note how the linked article decries “only 17%” using LBS–it’s amazing that nearly 20% of an enormous installed base are already here and growing. New behaviors and media used to take decades, then years and now months to create. Little perspective.

• R/GA’s Richard Ting weighs in on the cleverly named “New Social Media Splinternet”—while we’re big fans of Richard’s thinking, we respectfully disagree about holding off on experimentation with emerging platforms or that marketers lost their shirts as some platforms failed to emerge to scale. Ping us if you’d like to see our applied strategies for evaluating emerging media and its fit for your brand, strategy and objectives
• Social-Loco 2011conference was in town last week. We’ll work on a more comprehensive recap shortly, and in the meantime, here are slides used to frame one of the great panels from the day:
  • The “Other Dr Phil” Hendrix on “E-Commerce Goes Hyper-Local”

In Other News: Apple

• Apple crowned the most valuable brand
• Apple jumps 21 spots, to the 35^th largest corporation in America, according to this year’s Fortune 500 ranking

Fitness

• Make sure to turn it up a notch on your next run.  According to both Medincine & Science in Sports & Exercise and Ultimate Bootcamp, sprinting burns more fat than running longer–fits the theme from fast-spaces to fast companies to leaner start-ups; super performance is built into speed.

Will Apps Disrupt Every Trad Media While Establishing a New One?

Perhaps the title question is too narrow and should focus on industries Apps will disrupt beyond Media, and my prediction is that Apps will disrupt nearly everything from the way we consume and engage with brands and media to how we transact, visualize, congregate and curate our daily lives and loves. With that thunderous prediction let me offer a couple of windows into the Apps EcoSystem which Gartner predicts will become $58 Billion in a few years and conclude with some thoughts informing these predictions:

• AppNation Conference in San Francisco this Wednesday and Thursday, April 27-28, promises to deliver the “State of the Art” view of the EcoSystem. Register to attend in person and catch full-benefit of networking with founders and leaders in this emerging space or follow the hashtag on twitter: #appnationconf 
• Spend an hour with Drew Ianni, AppNation Chairman and Founder, presenting his view from the top of the Apps Ecosystem. Former Wall Street and Jupiter Analyst as well as top guy at ad:tech, Drew created AppNation to provide the best and biggest conference for the space. You can catch his Briefing at Anthem San Francisco here:

• And, here are the companion slides to the video:

Some additional thoughts to complement my prediction that Apps will disrupt nearly every business and consumer interaction:

As Drew points out the value chain is shifting from the hardware–although the most elegant hardware can win massive share as we’ve seen with the iPad and iPhone–to the software or Apps on these devices. This content spans devices and channels jumping from Social/Web to Mobile and PC/Tablets and eventually connected TVs. This shift has been swift and taken the most immediately associated/impacted industries by storm and surprise. PC veteran, Michael Dell, admitted yesterday that he didn’t see Tablets coming and PC-maker Acer reported 24% drop in sales as a result of tablet disruption.  The primary utility for Tablets? Apps.

As a result of this consumer draw, we can anticipate new, creative business models and entertainment forms to emerge and become as large a part of popular culture as anything Hollywood has ever produced. And, of course, Hollywood may spawn and will appropriate these new entertain forms.

As we’ve seen with Social Media, consumer adoption and new behaviors will inspire enterprise adoption as well. So, my prediction started in the title with Media, the most obvious place for disruption as we see media transformed with superior features, connectivity and transaction abilities to change how we think about distribution and engagement with Print, Radio, TV and even the Internet media that came before Apps. In establishing a new medium and channel it’s important to emphasize this is about disruption not replacing or destroying. Incombent business models will have to evolve and embrace the new medium to survive and thrive in the disruption.

Will Apps have their own mass-events like the Oscars, Grammy’s, Cannes or Tony’s? They already have their own conference. Hope to catch you at AppNation this week and every year going forward. Cheers!

Weekly Round-Up 4/25/11

Apps and Tablets

• AppNation Conference hits San Francisco this week, April 27-28 at the Moscone center. Register now at AppNationConf.com Here’s a preview & taste of why this is such a big deal:

• Like the smart phone, tablets are slowly but surely being integrated into everyday life.  We use them to watch movies, read books, and order a meal?  Massachusetts Institute of Technology dropout, Rajat Suri thinks that with his E La Carte we will all be doing just that.

Social Media

• Our friend Wedbush Securities SocialMedia Analyst Lou Kerner likes to say “Google gets Social” and here’s some evidence he’s on the right track: Facebook and Twitter influence Google’s Search Rankings
• Meanwhile, Fortune 500 companies aren’t optimizing their social media pages–Facebook and Twitter account aren’t showing up in online searches
• Keeping with this thread “5 Ways Facebook is Changing Search Marketing”
• And, one more commonality Twitter shares with Facebook: allegations of a forgotten co-founder
• Facebook facts round-up, ferinstance: there is a member profile for one for every 11 people on the planet

Global Social Gaming Overview

Two weeks ago, at AdTech, we presented a comprehensive overview of Social Gaming in the US.  The presentation was featured as a “Presentation of the Day” and Tim Chang of Norwest Venture Partners believes this may be the most current and comprehensive snapshot of the industry available today. You can also view the slides synchronized with the AdTech audio on Youtube.

Global Social Gaming Overview

On Tuesday April 12 we presented a sweeping overview of Social Gaming from its scope, scale and size in the US to the development of this space around the world. We shared how marketers can engage consumers in the space and wrapped with some informative case studies by Toyota. Some impressions, slides, video and links follow.

Weekly Round-up 4/11/11

Returning to weekly round-ups to recap curation of last week’s activities in Digital Marketing:

Conference Roll-up

• Web 2.0 Expo: “Lessons Learned Launching Dozens of Brand on Twitter”.  Key take away: content is essential and active management gives you the super fresh content a brand needs to rise to the top.
• What do you think can change everything?  After interviewing dozens of smart people and analyzing over 100 2011-trends predictions, I distilled my thoughts into this presentation for iMedia Breakthrough: “This Can Change Everything.”
• AdAge Digital top tweets:  75 tweets of impressions from AdAge Digital NY Conference
• See us at adtech San Francisco presenting an overview for brands in Social Gaming. Joining this session bringing a full range of international and brand perspectives will be Jimmy Kim from Nexon in Korea, Tim Chang from Norwest Venture Partners and Kimberly Kyaw from Toyota.

Marketing Trends

• Univision outperformed NBC in primetime again last week and every 30-seconds a Latino turns 18-years old. FastCompany asks “What does this mean for your brand?”
• Hubspot posted a great presentation on ways your marketing should be transformed.  They express our core thesis of magnetism nicely in 64 visually and content-rich slides.
• Speaking of magnetism, we were honored to host Guy Kawasaki in our offices and virtually on BrandSquare for an hour-long webinar on his latest book, Enchantment. Slides and video are available in this Book Review.

Social Media

• Facebook updates iPhone app to allow you to see friend’s locations and event check-ins on a map view. An obvious but meaningful development.

Change Everything

This post presents the content and discusses the process in my journey to create the “This Can Change Everything” presentation for iMedia Breakthrough Summit on March 21, 2011. It was a 30-45 minute discussion where I covered So|Lo|Mo, Gamification, Maker-movement and Social CRM/Caring after a hat-tip to Moore’s & Metcalfe’s laws combined with the “People” coefficient. With an extra 15-minutes allowance, I may have added connected TVs as a potential “return to the Family Room” theme. Regardless, these themes are ones that I believe can change everything in the coming years.

Dirty Brand Secret (video)

On Thursday, January 20, 2011 Method Brand Co-Founder+Chief Brand Architect and evangelist, Eric Ryan, dropped by our offices to take on our current theme of Social Mission/Causes. You can’t talk about Method as a brand without punctuating it with their rallying cry “People Against Dirty.” Or, said in the affirmative via their tagline: “for the love of clean.” Slogans that are rallying cries and tag lines that convey passion? These are more than just tools for a company with the stated goal of being “in business to change business.” In the hour or so that Eric spent with us he shared how this inside-out approach to their brand has driven revenues and retail success along with employee and consumer passion to the level of starting a small movement. And, as we’ve seen of late in global news, if you’re taking on established, incumbent power you need a different tool kit and approach.

Weekly Round-up 1/31/2011

Superbowl

• Salesforce.com buys ads around the Super Bowl halftime, for animated commercials that were developed with help from will.i.am
• Twitter launches Visa-sponsored Super Bowl microsite, aggregating all the chatter about the Super Bowl into one webpage
• Auto ads to make a Super Bowl comeback, signaling optimism as the automotive industry appears to be buying the most commercial time of any advertiser category during the game
• I’ll be adding other round-ups of historical Superbowl spots by popular categories on this blog in the coming week. In the meantime, feel free to pop by the PepsiCo round-up from last week and weigh in on your fav there or nominate one for consideration

Facebook:

• Facebook turns Like into it’s newest ad, appearing as “sponsored stories” that show up on the right-hand side of the screen
• Goldman’s investment pegs Facebook’s value at $50 billion, but Bloomberg reports that a poll of global investors reveals that 69% of think Facebook is overvalued. Last week former Forrester researcher Charlen Li suggested that $75 billion wasn’t out of the realm of reason considering their growth and lifetime user value. Here’s another article looking at rationalizations for valuations beyond $100b by 2015 (Wedbush’s Lou Kerner’s contribution)

Speaking of Valuations…

• LinkedIn’s IPO – it’s official the business and social network filed paperwork with the SEC
• Twitter now worth $4 billion – an accomplished $300 million increase in value in just over a month

Cyber Uprisings

• Following in Tunisia’s footsteps, Massive Egyptian protests powered by YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, Twitpic (Pics, Videos, Updates
• Egypt cuts off Internet access – the country’s government has gone beyond just blocking social media sites FB and Twitter in their effort to squash communication amongst protestors