Media Week reports (1/7/08) that by next year, the advertising expenditure forecast (current prices) on internet will be £4,055m higher than newspapers with £3,950m. Magazines will be £1, 476m enabling print to retain their historical chief advertising expenditure lead, just, but not for much longer instincts predict.

Went to the Online Marketing & Media08 Show is Islington a few weeks back and attended a panel discussion; Adriana Lukas, Al Tepper, and James Cherkoff were presenting biggest blunders in social media over the past few years and key lessons learned from them.

You could tell that it was the end of the day. The presenters seemed exhausted not to mention the audience. Hardly any interaction between the audience and the panel occurred, except from an individual at the back.

They discussed these big gaffes;
Sony’s All I want for xmas is a PSP
Nike’s Yoga SN site
GM Chevy Tahoe adverts
Coke’s Zero movement
Juicy Fruit’s blog
Bud.tv
Virizon and Walmart’s SN sites
Cilit Bang
Heinz’s create an advert competition
Moben’s kitchen hell

A few successes were mentioned too, highlighting how niche social networking is the way forward; e.g. Nike plus’s which has 14 million miles of running already logged on the site.

Had I read the description of the talk perhaps I wouldn’t have been so disappointed by the rehash of mostly old and well discussed material.

Most of the key lessons were identical, and I thought perhaps the range of gaffes could have presented a range of lessons…

The lessons for us all are:
Don’t underestimate the audience. Don’t assume you know them and patronise them. Bloggers are astute at detecting BS.
You can’t control social media’s user generated content. If you ask them to make ads and submit them, don’t turn round and say they are amateur.
Monitor your brand on line. You don’t have to have a blog to do this, but you should be listening/reading/commenting where appropriate on what others are saying about you.
The internet is one huge big focus group. Use it well.
Don’t use intermediaries to communicate. Those closest to the audience should be enabled. This means agencies stop writing your clients posts.
Viral marketing can blow issues out of proportion.
Marketing gives social context, just like dressing, but best blogs are simple and clear – so even if your client is a global FMCG brand, avoid forcing creative to over design to increase spend. ‘Lowfi’ it! (low finance). Look at Google’s success re design; very clear and very simple.

It is interesting to note Primark’s recent preferred method of communication in it’s recent ‘crisis communication’ response to use of child labour in supply production. Primark chose to respond to the criticism from the recent Panorama program via it’s website. Some say this is great to deal directly with concerned clients and engage them in conversation, others said they avoided their accusers by not participating in the program when invited.

It is becoming commonplace to have chicklets for social bookmarking sites at the end of web pages, for browsers to bookmark pages to remember, share, inform their friends/peers of a notable info on line, or even improve search engine results…

If you were wondering which bookmarking sites to include on your site follow this link to E-consultancy.com’s current conundrum or if you need a good basic intro, see this article on the BBC or wikipedia.

Enjoy.

Please visit our friend Bruce at Kermune for a straight forward explanation of social networks, what you can expect from one, and the difference between on line and real life (locality).

Launching an new micro/site but can’t find a url to suit you? This article on e-consultancy.com gives you the tools to help you name your new site and find out if the urls are available.

www.ajaxwhois.com
www.nameboy.com
www.domainnamesoup.com
www.nametumbler.com

Enjoy

Check out Vidize a newly launche Web 2.0 tool for Podcasters, broadcasters, bloggers and more.

Using Vidize allows you to record both sides of an interview online and then publish it as quickly as you need it. The site is very straight forward and easy to use.

Enjoy.

As always, we like to share useful online tools.
Using this site will allow you to search and find who posts podcasts on line: Mevio.com.

Happy browsing.

Please follow the link to read the article from ZD net Australia full of stats showing how much quicker and better firefox is than other browsers.

Writen by a firefox lover, we assume, you can’t ignore the stats which show that Firefox is quicker. We love the tabs, the downloading tool and much more.

Are you a Firefox fan too?

I’ve just come across this formula to use to create the best blog title:

(Number) (Adjective) (Key Phrase)

Try to use your keywords in the key phrase for good search results too.

Now let’s try it out:

10 Best Safari Spas
5 Tempting Tiramisu recipies
3 Revolting Monster Stories for under 5s

Your go….

At the recent Web 2.0 Expo Clay Shirky’s talk raised some interesting questions about the future of media. Play the clip:

He warns:
It takes time to adjust, as we did from the gin haze that settled into the industrial revolution. In our times, for the last fifty odd years, we’ve all been watching TV during our spare time or rather as our ‘cognative surplus’.
However, we’ve had the time to adjust and NOW is the time to be included.
We now will stop being passive and start to deploy. (AKA we can all individually do something)

Media targetted at you that doesn’t include you isn’t worth anything.

Watch out TV!