In my last post, I talked about the dangers of user-generated content and asked you how you felt about UGC and how we should use it. Your replies allowed me to dig deeper into this subject.

There have been quite a few sucessfull UserGeneratedContent campaigns these last few years, and the first lesson I learned is that each UGC campaign is a different experience.

In 2006, General Motors surprised everyone when they launched one of the first un-censored UGC campaigns. They gave away videos and pictures of their new Tahoe car, added an online editing tool and waited for contributions to roll in. The website was an overwhelming success, with coverage from bloggers and news site, especially after everyone realized that GM was not censoring the site and that controversial videos (pollution, etc) were intentionally left online.
Fallbacks? Excellent sales and growing market shares.

I highly encourage you to read this article from Wired magazine to learn more about this use case.

MyStarbucksIdea was launched in March 2008 and is also widely successfull: Thousands of ideas, comments and votes have been submitted by customers who are more than happy to contribute to the improvement of their local coffee house.

This use case illustrates a few “UGC” rules:

• Requiring users to log in will help self regulation of posts
• A voting system will act as an auto regulating mechanism: good ideas go up in the ranking, bad ideas get buried.
• Show your customers that you listen.

Dell is now an experienced UGC brand. Their first experience, Ideastorm is a website where users are encouraged to post their ideas on how to improve Dell products (they apply the same rules we highlighted above: login, voting, “ideas in actions”).
In march, they launched a new campaign to promote their “green-computers”. Called “Regeneration”, this operation encourages users to send drawings on the theme “What does green means to you?”

The results are impressive.

UGC of course is about content, and this content can be more than a support to marketing; it can become a key business asset. 20minutes is a free european newspaper, distributed in the streets and subway stations every morning. Their website is more than a substitute of the paper edition thanks to comments on all articles.

How do they ensure high quality content? Users are required to log in, a few moderators read the articles, but mainly users can alert 20minutes when inappropriate comments are sent.

I apologize for the self-promo (20minutes mobile services are developed by Backelite – FullSIX mobile agency). We helped them set up their latest service: a short number to which users can send pictures thru MMS. This new service is becoming very popular and today the frontpage is mostly made of pictures sent by users (protests about the olympic games)

It has been a real pleasure to investigate this topic. Please use the comments to delve deeper.

You know how much we love user generated content, and how much it is changing marketing.

UGC sets new problems for brands: how to control what consumers will say under my name? how to react to abuses?

In 2004, an unknown NYC traveler managed to change an electronic sign to read: Pretty girls don’t ride the subway. An early attempt to engage in conversation? It took a few hours before the sign was actually unplugged and this message lost.

South California saw a more obvious form of abuse when a “graffiti artist” somehow managed to set his own trademark imagery on huge digital highway billboards (see above).

Those offline examples, remind us that abuses are not new, and not specific to the web; but the growing importance of Internet and the fast spreading of information online can turn the work of a simple graffiti artist into a marketing crisis.

How many brands have really opened the door to UGC on their website? How do they control it?
How much risks is your brand ready to take in order to enjoy the benefits of user generated content?

Since last october and the annoucement of Flash Lite 3 by Adobe, there has been a lot of buzz around this new technology and what it means for mobile web.

Flash Lite’s main challenge is to reach a critical percentage of device coverage … over half a billion devices shipped so far, thanks. More important is the future: Will Flash Lite reach the same level of ubiquity it has on the web today?

Last week a joint announcement made by Adobe and Microsoft that Flash Lite will be integrated into Windows Mobile is a major step forward.

On Apple’s side, things are more confused …

Steve Jobs said two weeks ago that Flash is not the right solution for the iPhone. The Adobe CEO announced last week that they would start working on it themselves … and changed his statement a few hours later because Apple’s SDK license will not allow them to distribute a Flash Lite plugin for the iPhone.

A battle is raging, and there is so much buzz going on that it seems pretty likely that Flash (or Flash Lite) will make it on the iPhone soon.

With or without Apple, Flash Lite will change the mobile web, and mobile advertising. New ad-formats are being prepared and will be launched in Europe before this summer. They use Flash Lite to provide full-screen interstitials ads and sponsored mobile videos. Expect more from us soon…

15 years ago (on 3 December 1992) the first text message was sent from a computer to an handset in Vodafone labs.

Since then, text messages have changed our lifes.

All around the world new words and expressions appeared. Early Internet users knew how to save key strokes with shortcuts like “brb” ; text messages gave it a name : SMS language. New language introduced new habits, and text messaging became in a few years a very important part of seduction. In 1997, french rapper Mc Solaar sung: “Times are changing // Pick up! With a cellphone”.

SMS allowed new type of business services to emerge. Alerting gives customer information they need, wherever they are. It has been applied to many contexts: stocks alerts, delivery notification, breaking news, etc. More services are coming: Texting money is now possible in the US, northern europe and quickly spreading in the rest of the world.

And of course, text messaging is a very successful advertising channel: the only marketing channel that allows a brand to talk with a customer at a precise time with a very personal message that has an opening rate over 90%.

What next?

SMS is also a huge source of revenue for carriers all around the world, and they have been fighting very hard to protect it.
Experiences in Africa have shown that instant messaging can replace text messaging, it is probably just a matter of time. Now you have figured out why there is no instant messaging in iphone …

Anyway, out in the street or online, finding presents that reflect your personality is always a challenge (picking out of amazon dads top 10 was never trendy …).

There is so much content available online from you and your friends: Why not use that content to do something original?

This year has seen many new services show up that allow you to turn digital content into physical form. The idea is not new: online photo printing is an old story, but the possibilities are expanding.

Have you yet started a moo cards collection? Get some funny pics and turn them into lovely, high quality, original cards.

Remember that photo book that you bought last year for your parents and that is still unwrapped? Start iPhoto ‘08 on your Mac and under a few hours you will be ordering your own “nice book” (allow a few weeks for delivery). Dont own iWork ‘08? Blurb is available for PC and Mac.

If you do not want to spend that time working on your own book, Lulu will let you search through user uploaded books and buy them (self-publishing).

Just give me a way to publish my Google Sketch Up 3D creation and I will give you a wonderful christmas!

iPhone is already out in four countries. For those still waiting, there should be high hopes for iPhone has not only changed what we expect from our phones, but also what we expect from carriers.

Only a few months ago, unlimited data plans were a sweet dream for the early adopters among us.

On June 25th morning, only four days before iPhone launched in the US, the word spread out that AT&T would be launching a special data plans (”iplan”) including unlimited data over EDGE. A major revolution.

On the other side of the atlantic, hopes were building up … and went down when it appeared that european data plans would be limited.

Did they hear users moaning? Pretty unlikely. Did Steve call them and explain that his big plans for web applications would fail short without unlimited data plans? Plausible.
A few days later, the news came out in UK, Germany and France: unlimited plans (yes, really – no limit).

Cellphone companies are huge and slow companies that usually take years to prepare and lauch a new offer. Having four of them change business rules (iPhone costs a lot to carriers), get their network ready (visual voicemail and iphone browser both require specific developments) and jump in the big and risky world of unlimited data is an awesome achievement.

But the story does not end here. In France, SFR (Vodafone) and Bouygues Telecom both have announced unlimited data plan just a few weeks before the iPhone goes on sale. Apple is changing the rules …

Then I met Chumby. A true 21st century alarm clock, so much better than the previous one: It is completely open source, connects to my home network, has a wide touch screen and not only will it display weather forecasts, flickr pictures, my facebook status, and give me a few chuck norris facts; I can also customize it with my own widgets. All I need, is a little flash lite knowledge to write my own widgets.

Those new devices are slowly erasing the line between “being connected” and “being offline”. What took a computer yesterday, can now be done with an alarm clock and tomorrow with a fridge or a table.

Now I wonder, what smart services do we expect in the 5 minutes between alarm ringing and actually leaving bed?

I bet that your mobile phone, is always in your pocket, always on, ready to send or receive a phone call, so why not use it to communicate the web 2.0 way?
Applications like Nokia life blog, fring and Shozu let you stay in touch all the time.

Imagine :

• just send pictures taken with your mobile phone to Flickr and the integrated GPS will geo-tag them so that they appear on a google map directly where it was taken, now your network will be able to know where you were without opening a world atlas …
• Livecast to your blog or directly to youTube from your mobile the concert you are attending using Pocket Caster: all your friends who can’t attend will be happy (or jealous)…
• Twitt your friends directly from your mobile using fring, so you can let everybody know that the family dinner was terrible (hoping your mum isn’t reading your twitter page) …

This is just one more example of smart convergence: use every device for what it does best. Mobile just happens to be the best way to contribute to your web 2.0 life.
Mobile is not limited to contribution: if you don’t think it’s possible to waste as much time on social networks from a phone as you do from a computer, maybe it is time you try Facebook on iPhone.

Bruno Galice – Thomas Sarlandie

Until recent years, Technology would reach developing countries one or two decades after western countries, but with mobile technology the story is about to change:

Across developing nations in Africa, South America and Southern Asia, mobile technology is rapidly spreading, bringing along with it important (social and economic ) changes. Studies show that these technological advances stimulate a nation’s economic growth and improve the quality of life of its people.

On BBC Wap Portal forum, this message is one among many, proving that an online audience is no longer limited to developed countries :

I’m in Uganda and the only access I have 2 the outside world is this pinhole 2 info cause I don’t have access to TV. Thanx.

In fact, in 2006 61% of BBC’s international WAP traffic was coming from Nigeria.

It could even be said that Mobile banking is more advanced in Africa than in Europe. Every South African bank has a mobile banking solution.

What does this mean for marketing? Your website’s audience is expanding beyond the realm of the developed world and consequently your communication might touch more people than you thought. More specifically, if you are not already keeping an eye on new operations in these once thought of as distant lands, maybe it’s time to start paying attention.

For those interested, a few links to dig deeper:

• MTC Report on the Socio-Economic Impact of Mobile Phones in the Arab World
• The Impact of Mobile Phones in Africa (Prepared for the Commission for Africa)
• Vodafone study on Socio-Economic impact of mobile phones in Africa
• South Africa : Mobile Simplifies Marketing
• W3C : Bridging the digital divide

• Google is leading the way with gmail,
• Google Maps (editor’s choice ; highly recommended),
• And others …
• Yahoo Go! brings you most Yahoo Apps to your mobile.
• Microsoft is in too with Windows Live Search
• And a beta version of Windows Live Messenger.

EBay and MySpace lauched commercial services.

Are those applications a major move on the market? Definitely. Does this mean mobile web sites are dead before popular? Nope.

Mobile applications can not compete with mobile sites when you need 100% coverage of your users and they are a lot more expensive to develop (think: java, symbian, windowsmobile, brew, etc).

What they bring is a peek in what mobile sites experience should be when phone browsers are advanced enough. This day is getting close as iPhone applications developpers are expected to write their application using W3C standards.