Ideas were at the at the heart of why I started this blog. One of the first posts that I wrote there being a sweet spot in the complexity of products based on the ideas of Dan Greer. I wrote about the first online election fought by Howard Dean, which now looks like a precursor to the Obama and Trump presidential bids.
I articulated a belief I still have in the benefits of USB thumb drives as the Thumb Drive Gospel. The odd rant about IT, a reflection on the power of loose social networks, thoughts on internet freedom – an idea that that I have come back to touch on numerous times over the years as the online environment has changed.
Many of the ideas that I discussed came from books like Kim and Mauborgne’s Blue Ocean Strategy.
I was able to provide an insider perspective on Brad Garlinghouse’s infamous Peanut Butter-gate debacle. It says a lot about the lack of leadership that Garlinghouse didn’t get fired for what was a power play. Garlinghouse has gone on to become CEO of Ripple.
I built on initial thoughts by Stephen Davies on the intersection between online and public relations with a particular focus on definition to try and come up with unifying ideas.
Or why thought leadership is a less useful idea than demonstrating authority of a particular subject.
I touched on various retailing ideas including the massive expansion in private label products with grades of ‘premiumness’.
I’ve also spent a good deal of time thinking about the role of technology to separate us from the hoi polloi. But this was about active choice rather than an algorithmic filter bubble.
I am doing some part-time study at the moment and teamed up with some of my fellow students to look at gamification trends. We had a grand total of just over 2 1/2 hours to score sources for information about gamification and its use in marketing.
Gamification is only new in respect to the way one looks at the problem rather than a new, new idea. When one thinks back to the early days of the web and the way AOL chat room moderators where incentivised this employed gamification before the concept was discussed. In it’s present form however there hasn’t been that much research done about it.
Gamification the way we now understand it from a digital marketing perspective probably goes back to the work done at Carnegie Mellon University about Games With A Purpose.
The incentives that seem to work best are in order of priority:
Status
Access
Power
Stuff
Interested surged in the concept of gamification from the second half of 2010, but the body of literature about it is only a small fraction of that about digital marketing AND the bulk of the literature about gamification is focused at how it can be applied from a technological or business process point of view. From a mainstream media perspective the level of interest has surged since the beginning of the year.
In terms of research, Gartner seems to have led the way in terms of predictions about the growth of gamifying activities within enterprises, this is probably why it is getting so much attention around business processes rather than marketing.
Measurement of engagement according to M2 research revolves around four aspects:
Engagement: unique visits, time spent on site / page views
Loyalty: repeat visits, invite a friend
Virality: sharing, appearance on social channel communications
Monetisation: conversion rates, purchase of virtual goods, registration
Of these four categories the few successful case studies that we found focused on engagement and loyalty. Social networks were used as a conduit and a platform for gamification layers. For instance, allkpop.com used Badgeville to drive increased engagement and sharing of their site content.
Since this is a relatively young area of digital marketing we found some serious gaps in available information about gamifying campaigns including:
Project failure rates
B2B case studies
Examples of commerce / conversion
The critical factor in planning a programme based on gamifying an action seemed to be in the selection and fine tuning of the game mechanic and how it was applied.
The presentation is on Slideshare so may not be available to all readers. More related content here.
Pete Sigrist sent over a link to 33 Digital’s take on gamification, which I wasn’t able to reference at the time. But there you can read it over at Scribd.
When I started off having an interest in DJing I went around to a a friend’s house whose older brother was into audio engineering. As well as having one of the first set of Technics 1200s I had ever seen he had a Revox B77 tape recorder. He used to record tracks on to the tape reels and then splice the tape to make tracks longer by extending breaks, or extend the breakdown or vocal hook of a track into staccato repetitions; which sounded like Max Headroom-esque stutters of vocal hook or ‘machine gun’ drum breaks.
Splicing tape took patience, practice and a modicum of skill to achieve. At the time however it was the Revox B77 tape machine itself that I fell in love with. These machines were made in Switzerland and felt like they were hewn from aluminum. Even the buttons were solid, giving positive feedback through a satisfying clunk when pushed and the VU meters glowed with a warm light and needles danced as the sound levels went up and down. As interfaces went, the analogue controls of the tape machine have yet to be beaten by anything that Apple has come up with. All of this belied the complex engineering that happened inside. All of this engineering expertise turned out machines that were about the best recorded sound that money could buy. Many artists today record digitally, transfer on to an analogue tape machine like the B77 and then master back to digital for CD manufacture and iTunes reproduction because of the way analogue treats sound.
Revox was a consumer facing brand of Swiss professional audio manufacturer Studer (now part of Harman International) and much of that professional engineering went into the Revox products. The Revox tape machines were professional ‘wolves’ in consumer electronics ‘sheep’s’ branding.
The B77 series of machines came out in 1979 and sported full logic controls (which made things smoother) and direct drive motors (which meant that everything got up to speed faster), but otherwise improved on the A77 of the late 1960s. The machine used 10 1/2 tape spools to make its recordings on with a tape throughput of 15 inches per second on most models which was the professional master recording standard and one could vary the speed up to over 20 inches per second if you wanted to – this operated a bit like pitch control on a Technics SL-1200 turntable.
The B77 series came in a number of guises:
The LS ran at low speeds for radio stations and call centres that needed to log everything that happened
The basic model which ran only at consumer speeds
The HS which ran at professional tape recording speeds
The PR99 (Mk I, II and III) which were designed to be more edit friendly and had less knob controls which could get in the way of the manual tape splicing process
All of this engineering came at a cost and the Revox B77 weighed a proverbial ton (actually closer to 20Kg for the machine itself plus whatever you carted it around in, like a studio rack or a flight case)
Quarter inch tape recording isn’t dead, the tape is still made around the world by Quantegy, RMGI, ATR Magnetics and Jai Electronic Industries. Otari Inc still makes an analogue studio master machine and Denon still sells a similar machine for broadcast purposes in Asia.
In addition, high end studios still use multi-track digital reel-to-reel machines when you want to record to 48 tracks as the time code technology and audio encoding technology used in them is superior to more modern computer-based solutions. More related content can be found here.
I’m an unusual choice to write about the Sony Vaio PCG C1. I’ve only had PC envy with a couple of devices during my twenty something years at a Mac user:
In common with the 701, the Sony Vaio PCG C1 impressed me with its product design. In a pioneering design for 1998, the Sony Vaio PCG C1 included a built in web camera above the screen that could be rotated to try and ensure an optimum camera position.
Sony made a small modular computer. What was important was what they had left out in their device case and instead relied on a set of outboard peripherals so the user could bring or configure their computer set-up to suit their needs. The PCMCIA (Personal Computer Memory Card International Association) slot was equivalent of the USB socket today and used to connect a wide range of devices including both fixed-line and GSM wireless modems.
The beauty extended on to the inside of the devices with some of the range using a Transmeta Crusoe processor. The Crusoe was the Intel Atom almost a decade before the Atom; it used a combination of software techniques and hardware innovations to reduce heat output and improve power consumption. This had some benefit in terms of battery improvement, but battery life relies on a combination factors such as screen power, hard drive power and other parts on the circuit board.
This device is even more remarkable when you realise that the Vaio PCG C1 was launched some seven years before Steve Jobs went on stage at Apple’s Worldwide Development Conference in 2005 to announce the move to Intel processors because of a new focus on computer power per Watt. You could consider the MacBook Air that I am typing this post out on as a spiritual successor to the Vaio C1. More Sony posts here.
Bob Barker is a client that I worked with on nascent digital work for RFI Studios. Bob worked as the CMO of Alterian. Alterian started off in customer experience management, they did a series of acquisitions when I worked with them including Mediasurface the CMS company. The company was acquired by SDL and some part of it was sold on to private investors.
Flip video camera
Bob decided to delve into social media and understand it as a marketer. The Flip Video camera which includes basic software inspired him to do video content. Bob had a ‘Gorilla tripod‘ for the Flip and the lighting was just done with daylight. I did an interview with Bob Barker for his blog last week, you can read his take on things on his blog.
I realise that we talk through a number of social platforms, so here is a list of what I use:
iMessage – though I have found it to be flaky
Skype
Fastladder.com for RSS feeds. I am currently experimenting with FavShare as a Fastladder client on my iPad and iPhone which started after my interview with Bob
Pinboard.in for social bookmarking
IFTTT to syndicate content
Microblogging: I use the Twitter client on my Macs at home, and m.twitter.com on my iPhone. I use Weibo’s iPhone client and WeiLark for the Mac to post on my Sina.com Weibo account, rather than Sina’s sluggish web interface
I use Kakao Talk and Tencent Weixin (WeChat) social messaging clients on my iPhone. The international versions of these tools don’t have all the features the local ones.
I use a mix of technology:
MacBook Pro
Dell 22 inch widescreen display
MacBook Air
iPhone
iPad
Samsung feature phone with dual SIMs
The video is on YouTube so may not be available to all readers. You can find Bob’s video channel here.
Ferdinand A. Porsche, 76, Dies – Designed Celebrated 911 – NYTimes.com – Butzi Porsche dead. Butzi Porsche came from a family of engineers. His grandfather led the original team behind the Volkswagen Beetle. His father had been part of that engineering team and went on to found what we now know as Porsche. However, Butzi Porsche wasn’t engineer but a designer with technical chops. After an infamous meeting of the Porsche family, no members were allowed to work at Porsche. Butzi Porsche didn’t get to do more after he designed the 911. Instead Butzi Porsche started Porsche Design. Butzi Porsche did product design for other companies. Porsche Design also came out with its own products with Butzi Porsche designing watches, glasses and more. Butzi Porsche resigned from Porsche Design in 2005 due to ill health.
Why Are So Many Americans Single? : The New Yorker – single living was not a social aberration but an inevitable outgrowth of mainstream liberal values. Supported by modern communications platforms and urban living infrastructure: coffee shops, laundrettes
Kraft break-up yields marketing shift: Warc.com – the break-up is ironic when you look at the trouble they went to, in order to buy Cadburys and then break their business down broadly into Cadburys + Jacobs Suchard vs Kraft US.
HK’s rich hesitate to have babies | SCMP.com – interesting takeaways: didn’t want the emotional commitment, time poverty, financial stability / too small a living space and concerned about the local environment not being suitable for children. It was interesting that the education system was given such a hard time, given that it’s better than the UK system (paywall)
agnès b. | VICE – great interview with French fashion designer agnés b
Marketing
Fueling the hunger for The Hunger Games – The New York Times – really interesting comment: …during the 1980s you bought the poster and once a year went to a convention and met your people for something like Star Trek (and Star Wars). It misses out the fact that you are likely to have had real-world friends that you would have talked about it with as well – marketers now seem blindsided to the real-world
