ASOS, the ultra popular online fashion retailer, has taken a brave transparent step with it’s latest dedicated campaign site and pushed their real-time sentiment analysis straight to the consumer via it’s new site asosreviews.com

Sentiment analysis, just one of the ultra hot topics currently rocking the Social Media Monitoring (SMM) world is when you use tools, sometimes manually but often these days automatically, to judge/guess what the people out there who are talking about you/your brand/your product are saying and basically if they are saying nice things or horrible things.

it’s not an exact science at the moment, and it can be done wrong in the raw terms of GOOD vs BAD (especially when you consider things like the word “bad” sometimes meaning “good” – well, in a king of Michael Jackson way… I am sure you know what I mean! Hey, I’m down with the kids!) but overall it is good at giving you an idea of if you’re in the good books or not. backed with human elements then, and manually going over the conversations happening in various social media spaces, you can get a pretty good understanding of things.

so, what ASOS are doing is sticking that raw (presumably) sentiment analysis straight online for all to see.

Their policy is one of transparency – and this is about as transparent as you can get with your audience. if you do something bad, they’ll tell you I am sure, and that in turn will tell other customers etc. so as a brand, in this way, you had best be good right!

it’s very brave of the brand and I have to say I do salute it as a campaign move. I think it’s safe to say that they have the right kind of audience and are the right kind of brand to do this kind of thing – there are certain brands which this obviously wouldn’t work for or just plain wouldn’t have the b*lls to go for it in the first place – so it’s a good bit of judgement on their part and the part of the agency who put it together for them, thruSites.

At the moment apparently the world is happy with asos – which is nice to know

I like this – great piece of comms and good for some quick, easy win, hot topic awareness raising.

Should get the tongues wagging!

Howard

This is great.  Not just because I love kinetic type, but because it shows Best Buy get it, and they realise the power of the revolution we’re involved in.

Big thanks to Matt Alder as always for sending it my way.

Howard

I’ve seen more and more brands dipping their toes into twitter for use as a sales promotion channel lately.

Brands have been on twitter for quite some time now, as well all know, some having good success, and others not doing it quite as well as they could, but what we’ve not fully seen are brands using it as a direct communications channel to clients in relation to a competiton or game, with differing end goals by the look of it.

Only last week, my attention was drawn to a competition being run by Asus computers, producers of the well loved EeePC series, for the launch of a new model they have created (known as the Asus SeaShell for reasons that I can’t fathom aside from it, like all laptops, looks a bit like a clamshell). For your chance to win one of these machines you simply had to follow the brand on twitter (@asusuk) and in turn, they would select a user at random, once a week, to be the lucky winner of the machine.  When I chose to follow them they had about 40 followers.  Now, they have 1472 – not massive by anyone’s measure, but not too shabby either.  All I can think of was that this was an attempt to grow their follower-base to hit the right kind of people who might, in turn, spread the word to others interested in netbooks and so on – so, actually, in terms of “hitting the right people” this is probably quite an interesting exercise for them.

So, one week later, and I come across an email from another technology company, Novatech, a tech and PC retailer which you might not have heard from (but for those of us tech-inclined on the south-coast of the UK trust me, they’re a god-send at times!)  Novatech are running a similar competittion to Asus, but it, for me, fails at the first hurdle due to the barrier to entry.

Again it’s to win a netbook (this time from MSI) and all you have to do is follow BOTH MSI and Novatech on twitter (@msitweets and @novatechltd) – so not one, but two – and then you have to tweet on your own profile that you’re following them, AND then…  you have to register on the novatech forum and post a link on that to your twitter page.

*PHEW*

got that?  couldn’t be simpler right?  erm… well, perhaps it could.  I think this is a bad example of how to use the channels around twitter for a promotion.

And finally, although by no means the last “brand” on twitter doing so, everyone’s favourite mockney chef, Jamie Oliver (@jamie_oliver), is running a regular competition each Friday called “Jamie’s Twitchen” (see what he did there?) where by he asks a question, and the first person from around the twitterverse to reply with the correct answer and the hashtag #jamiestwitchen wins a prize which changes each week.

This is, for me, a great example of how to use the channel in a positive, respectful way that actually makes use of the unique nature of twitter itself, rather than trying to make it into something it’s not intended to be for the sake of a few thousand email addresses you can bombard.

What I think these illustrates is a couple of things.

1) brands (large and small, world famous and not) are waking up to twitter as a very immediate here-and-now channel to run competitions in – and the power of communicating directly to your core audience and what that can give you.

2) sometimes, social media usage can be taken to far (not mentioning any names Novatech!) in your quest to grab user details and build up a pool of “followers” to spread the word to (less is often more)

Twitter is, as I pointed out to a senior client I work with via a linkedin conversation last night, simply another channel within which we can conduct digital marketing.  It’s not the answer to everything, but it’s emerging quite rapidly, that using twitter as part of a sales promotion strategy, or a games/comps strategy, really does seem to work – but as with everything, treat it with respect and don’t abuse the power it can give you.

Overall, I like this trend, I like that we, the users of twitter, are coming up with a plethora of new ways to work it.

It’s evolving!

Howard

–

sometimes it’s amazing how quickly the internet can work against you as a digital marketer.

Last week it was discovered very quickly indeed that Belkin, provider of electronic bits and bobs such as network cards etc., had allegedly posted to the Amazon Mechanical Turk system (a marketplace for getting work carried out by an army of human workers – the kind of thing computers are good at in scale but not good at in ability) asking for people to write “fake” reviews of it’s products for them – applying a 5/5 rating, and while at it, mark down bad reviews to get them out of the way.  This was, again allegedly, done by Michael Bayard who is a Business Development Representative.

This is bad enough in it’s own right, the someone “might” think this is a good thing to do.  But within a short time it was spotted by someone, and then reported on Engadget.com

OUCH!

Today we see on Belkin’s own website a letter within their press section where they say how disappointed they are for the fact that this “may” have happened by a Belkin employee and that in fact they “support our online user community in discussion and reviews of our products, whether the commentary is good or bad” as of course they should.

Sometimes these lessons have to get learnt the hard way, but i thought this kind of thing had gone extinct a long time ago – but it seems that every now and then someone “might” just get it wrong and think they can influence things in the wrong way.

Belkin’s President, Mark Reynoso, who posted the letter on their own site has got it right when he says “both good and bad” – that’s the benefit to getting feedback about your products, being able to see where you are going wrong and then make them better!

It worked for Palm recently – their new Pre has made them the golden child once more and they used to get a serious kicking from all over the place – even getting an open letter from Engadget.com – to which they responded in an open way!

transparency – it’s the key to this kind of activity.

Don’t make the mistake that Michael Bayard may have made, allegedly, and trust your audience to do the right thing.

Howard

–

A lot of buzz going on right now about Yahoo! and it’s several hardware partners (which include heavyweights like Sony and Samsung) moving closer and closer to the launch of the “Yahoo! Connected TV” platform – a combination of HDTV hardware (like you probably have right now in your house) and some extras, seemingly from Intel and Yahoo!, which allow the TV to display widgets, pulling in various snippets of internet content, right on the TV screen itself alongside the usual programming and shows.

Since Yahoo! purchased Konfabulator some years ago, I’ve not really seen them do anything outstanding with the engine that the likes of Microsoft and Google were not doing with their own Widget and Gadget platforms.

This to me seems like the first major step in widget evolution since apple really decided to build it right into the OS with Dashboard, making it common place for all mac users and then windows users as MS followed suit and built it into Vista.

What is exciting about this though is it’s not a PC.  It’s not a Mac.  It’s not some techy “add-on” perceived by the masses to be geeky – it’s built right in there to the TV.  The device most people interact with on a daily basis for several hours.

Because of this, Connected TV is designed to be user friendly by the average Joe consumer from the ground up.

Use your remote to bring up the TV Widget Dock, select all your favorite TV Widgets, and connect to popular Internet services and online media, while you watch your favorite show.

Making it hopefully as easy for users to get access to widgets as it is to switch over to Celebrity Big Brother.

As digital marketers we’ve been trying to capitalise on the wide distribution, easy development, and very focused audience groups that widgets provide for some time – with varying degrees of success – but the big problem has always been that widget use is restricted to a niche audience who are generally highly technical.  It’s never been a mainstream media channel.

Connected TV could just change all of this, and if it becomes a standard, built in to all TVs that the likes of LG, Sony and Samsung create (I don’t think it will be initially – it’ll be an added cost extra for sure) then people will hopefully get as used to using widgets (even forgetting that they are widgets and simply regarding them as part of TV) on a normal daily basis.

If that were to happen, then as digital marketers we would have a huge new environment with which to target consumers.

I also wonder what this connected platform would mean for segmentation and targetted advertising?  Maybe nothing – but I wonder if they’ve thought about pushing ads to people?  Hopefully not – thinking about it it would be amazingly intrusive to get an overlay banner for the new series of Lost popping up during the latest episode of Heroes!  Scratch that – it’d suck

But -widgets are good – they’re user accessed when they want them.

We like that.

Upon launch it looks like the platform will contain content, naturally, from a key selection of Yahoo! properties like Flickr, and some other 3rd party partners like Blockbuster, Ebay and Twitter (how cool is that!).  But, there’s also an API that any developer can tap into to make widgets for the platform – meaning it’s open to all of us – which is just great from the start (So, Apple, missing something with the AppleTV yet??)

Yahoo! – please please deliver the goods on this.

Oh, and Microsoft?  You might want to check out the sweet user interface that this platform has compared to WIndows 7 Media Center (which isn’t being shown AGAIN at CES? We get no love in the Media Center community??)  Yahoo! makes you look stupid in terms of visual design and usability over a TV interface!

Howard

I am working on an update to a work based wiki and I was wondering how many people currently use something similarly wiki based for:

• Information sharing
• Project team collaboration
• As a knowledge base for case studies, templates and more
• As a forum for questions and answers

The big question, of course, is how to encourage participation? I’m thinking that the build it and they will come approach is not going to take off.

Jon

I hate twitter. Ever since I first heard about it; I thought it was the most pointless, self-obsessed, pathetic thing ever. Who has the time to constantly monitor this much information. It makes sense if you are following a terrorist, criminal or cheating spouse, maybe.

I have quite strong feelings on this because I have tried and failed to get it. I like my status updates on Facebook. It is one of the first things that I check when I go to the site. Now status updates are pretty much the same as twitter. So, I think the reason I don’t get it is it needs to be integrated into something else: my mobile contact list.

And, for some reason I can never import my contact list from Gmail.

Jon

Anyway, I am trying twitter one last time under jmulvihill if you feel like enlightening me.

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The Yahoo design pattern library has been reorganized and updated with lots of new patterns. It is more than ever an invaluable resource for documenting rich interaction design. It is the first place that I go for information on interaction consistency and how to communicate these patterns to others.

Jon