A friend of mine is involved with Fellowforce. The concept is that a challenge is posed by a company and then an innovation pitch is put forward to solve it by one of the fellows. There is a place for this I believe, it’s new so the main challenge right now will be getting a critical mass of companies with problems to solve and excellent case studies of people coming together. What I hope is that Fellowforce get through the next years and build up a really strong methodology and ways to deal with both sides. It reminds me a little of Google and Yahoo answer products but with a stronger non-ad supported business model… It could be that problems from high cost territories get answered by lower cost economies, where there is plenty of innovative talent… In the end I believe they will also need to target what Forrester call the “creators” that account for 7% of the Internet, those that create content for others (wikipedia etc.), but with 1 Billion Internet users that is still a big number. Good luck guys.
Archive for June, 2007
Not wanting to isolate one brand in particular, but needing a solid case study I propose Coditel. I want to explain the impact of social media and its connection to the importance of search engines.
Coditel provide cable and telephony services in Belgium but mainly in the Brussels Region. There are people who are unhappy with the service they provide and some of the techniques they employ. My own frustration was when they removed BBC2 from our subscription saying that there was a need to upgrade to the digital service to get it back… I said nothing but happened upon a post from Peter Forret who was analysing some of their channel choices. I commented on the blog explaining my situation. Now two things are interesting about this blog post.
1. There have been 13 comments and in the main they are negative (one positive comment). They are also over a long period of time, it seems that people are coming across the post through search engines and not necessarily because they are coming regularly to Peter’s blog. This is a beautiful focus group on the experiences clients are having with them.
2. If you go to Google and type the word Coditel, the 4th web site is the blog post. Even better the text Google chooses is my comment. (I guess Google isn’t good enough to know it is me searching…). There is a good chance that people coming to the site will see this post.
Impact for Coditel:
Well if they aware of these issues then they have a way to communicate how they will address it. Based on some search statistics I have access to it seems that 1,000 people search for Coditel every year. These are not massive numbers but when people do the search they will come across the brand in a very negative way and given the increase in word-of-mouth driven by web it cannot be good. I expect they are having problems dealing with a transition to their new services. There are a very large number of unhappy clients who talk of customer service that don’t answer or even worse extremely long queues at their offices in Brussels. I know all of this because I have found connections to it on the web.
As there is little choice of providers in Brussels, Coditel may decide to do nothing. If I was a shareholder this would be worrying if longer term brand value means anything to them. I would suggest they reach out to consumers with higher investment in customer service. Furthermore they should instigate a comprehensive online outreach campaign where they explain where they stand and communicate with their unhappy stakeholders…
Another gem from the guys at Trendwatching, with the web comes perfect exposure…
Our study shows that an increasing amount of the online consumer buzz attributed to the Playstation 3 is about the Blu-ray functionality. What is really interesting is that the xbox generates relatively little commentary about the competitive HD DVD platform. We monitored thousands of articles in blogs over May and June and the results make for interesting reading. The data showed that just over the last month there has been a three fold increase in references to Blu-ray in connection to the Playstation platform.
In early May when the Playstation 3 was discussed there was a 3-4% chance that Blu-Ray would be mentioned, now this number is trending at around 10%. We also noticed an increasing number of gamers highlighting the better performance of the xbox but suggesting the Playstation 3 is really an ideal platform for watching Blu-ray DVDs. Driving the increase in recent buzz is the announcement that Sony will offer a cheaper Blu-ray enabled DVD player designed to target consumers in this growing market. Some of the feedback centered around the price only being $100 less than the PS3 and that the PS3 offers Blu-ray playback.
In terms of raw sentiment the popularity of Wii is very high across the board. Xbox appears favoured by hard core gamers, so is Playstation falling into an unattractive gap?
I am at the IAB congress, Interact. Jaap Favier from Forrester delivered a really interesting piece on what Forrester call Social Computing. They have four categories of people in the world of the web (see a pyramid). The creators 7% at the top of the pyramid, the ones that make content, contribute if via Wikipedia etc. The next step in the pyramid are the critics which account for 18%, collectors 18% and finally the wonderfully named “couch potatoes”. Engagement by marketing differs with couch potatoes reached by Push marketing, collectors reached by providing content, critics with dialogue and finally the creators can be touched by giving a platform for their creativity (Wikipedia, Nike bespoke running shoes etc.). Very interesting stuff, definitely good in understanding this new paradigm in marketing and communications.