In September 2007 we wrote an article about Browser based games. We showed you some examples and why they were growing – basically in a stresstetained world, users have less time to completely focus on full-fledged videogame. Browser based games were an intelligent and obvious solution to this problem as they would allow users to spend very little of their time on each login.
Two years later, we live on the Mafia rule. The article in question shows the rise to power of the Social Networking-based game Mafia, which spreads from Facebook to Myspace to the IPhone. The question that comes to mind is – although Browser Based Games were already strong, how do Social Networks helped them (in this case, the Mafia franchise) grow to a point where you can’t check your Facebook Notices without coming across a Mafia post?
Browser Based games took a natural evolution towards Social Networks due to their strong friend need component. Most of these games require the user to have friends in order to help grow your power – be it having more power in fights or gaining rare items, for example. Before entering the Social Networks, the users had to add users manually via e-mail addresses. Now you just post on your wall, broadcast to your friends or send massive invites and see how bites.
Not only is this, but the app itself is programmed to broadcast certain comments to users when you do specific actions. You can deactivate these posts via the app options, but most users will let it happen because they want other users to help them grow. It is a definite proof that, if it benefits the user and makes sense in the app nature, then they don’t mind letting brands or product communicate via their account.
Sure, it sounds obvious that this evolution was natural, but it doesn’t seem so obvious for some Brands who still aren’t dwelling on the Social Networks. The raw potential of users and their involvement can make wonders for a product or brand. Today Mafia is known by practically every user on Facebook – be it because they play on it or they have at least one friend who does. The bottom line is that they play Mafia, but Mafia also plays them.

UPDATE: On August 15, 2008 The Trendwatch received a cease and desist letter from the lawyers of a company named Fricken, which states that Fricken owns a trademark for the term ‘brandstream’ so that neither The Trendwatch nor Fullsix are allowed to use that term. I’ve edited the post accordingly.

According to a Universal McCann report, content consumed outside of websites has increased by 153% in the last 9 months. Furthermore, 53% of online users are consuming content outside of a publisher’s site (using widgets, RSS readers, social networks and mobile devices). A pretty good example is Ford’s Digital Snippets: YouTube videos, images from Flickr, extensive usage of tags, RSS…

Just by looking at what’s happening in our (new gorgeous) Fullsix office in New York, we’re helping four of our biggest clients to dive into this. And most of the other ones are convinced that they should develop their own content outside of their brand site. So based on this very unscientific poll, I would say that YES, brands are ready!

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.

Damon and I arrived in Austin, Texas, last Thursday to do our best to represent the Trendwatch Daily team and the Fullsix Group in THE Interactive Festival of the Year, SxSW (pronounced South by South West). It’s our first time here and we’re thrilled by the high quality of the speakers, from Jason Fried (Founder of 37 Signal) to Michael Lopp (Senior Engineering Manager at Apple). Topics are definitively super inspiring (Top 10 Lessons learned in e-commerce by Zappo’s CEO, Social Marketing Metrics Strategies…).

The main event was expected to be the Mark Zuckerberg’s Keynote, CEO of Facebook, and we haven’t been disappointed. The auditorium was packed with a super-excited crowd, ready to listen to the 23-year-old billionaire speak about the social network site and the challenges encountered in the recent past (think NewsFeed, Beacon, Privacy, Openness…). But it didn’t go that well, because of a very weird dynamic between him and the over-friendly and egocentric interviewer, author and journalist Sarah Lacy. Questions asked were boring, and she was mainly interested about talking about herself and her upcoming book than trying to challenge Zuckerberg.

Members of the audience were quick to express their frustration, both online (Twitter and Meebo dedicated channel for SxSW) and in the room, someone shouting her “Ask interesting questions”, while even the young CEO was being annoyed by her self-oriented endless questions, answering with a mere : “OK”, “Sure” and finishing her with a “You have to ask questions”, since she kept telling uncomfortable stories about their first encounters. Which generated a huge cheer from the crowd, booing the famous journalist, forcing her to give up on the interview and, Digg-style, pass the microphone to the crowd for a (disappointingly) super short Q&A session where topics like data portability, application saturation and privacy finally got a chance to be discussed.

Tomorrow, on the menu: Going social now, Judo moves for defending your reputation online, and more taco/margaritas overdose. We’ll certainly come back to our respective offices with great topics to share with you here but also in the next issue of the Trendwatch Keynote. So stay tuned by subscribe to our RSS feed or our daily digest email for your inbox.

By the way, if you’re like my friend Sylvie who was waiting for the French version of Facebook, Sarah Lacy broke the secrecy and announced it in front of a shocked Zuckerberg that it would be released on Sunday night. Still not spotted on the site though.

If you’re in Austin and want to meet at one of the 20+ party tomorrow, leave a comment or drop us a line!

MARTHA STEWART, THE MOTHER OF ALL

She’s the Oprah of cooking and was once one of the most powerful women in the US, before being convicted of lying to investigators about a stock sale for which she had to serve five months in prison. She’s even bigger after a much publicized comeback at the head of a media and merchandising empire. The content of years of tips and recipes found in her magazines, books and TV shows are gathered in one site, while acting as a hub promoting all the goods under her name, sold at Kmart, Lowe’s, Macy’s…
I love the site’s refined design, the depth and quality of content, and the small and subtle touches of AJAX. And it adds to my homemaking cred.

TASTE SPOTTING, HIP AND INTRIGUING

Started in 2007 by the NotCot team, the site acts like an aggregator of recipes found on different blogs and submitted by the readers. No complex search tool here, the user browse through a grid of gorgeous images until inspired by one of them, clicking on it to be redirected to the source blog. Surprisingly addictive.

COOKTHINK, THE ONE THAT LISTENS

You just bumped into your sexy date on a date with another date, and decide to impress your girlfriends with some South American food based on the few ingredients available in your fridge. That’s basically what CookThink offers you. Browse the tag cloud and select all the relevant items. So that would be in this case consoling, Argentinian, chicken and onion. And you get… French Onion And Shallot Soup! OK, I guess that the search engine needs some fine tuning. Give chance another spin by clicking on “Almost… show me more recipes”, which is actually my favorite page on the site. I also dig the related tips, the Meal Builder and their blog.

OPEN SOURCE FOOD, THE SOCIAL SITE FOR HOME-CHEFS

That one has a list of impressive features for a site developed by one guy! Recipes are user-generated, and “home-chefs” have a profile page that gathers submitted recipes, loved ones, comments posted by others… You can follow your favorite users to be updated when they post new dishes. A bit like facebook’s Activity Feed for gourmets, sans the retarded apps. Seriously impressive, convenient and well thought.

Social tools’ usage and potential are far from have been completely explored. This is a fact. Besides their original use – Social Networking for friend aggregation or Social Bookmarking for common bookmarks shared on a webpage – there are subsequent effects and results that have derived from the constant use and reinterpretation of social tools. One specifically comes as a result of peer pressure, generation Y and the Youniverse theory – the rise of a civic and social conscience on the Web.

Surely you’ve come across P. Diddy’s campaign “Vote or Die”. A political service group, Diddy’s group Citizen Change aimed at getting young people to vote. Exercising civic duties is a lost art on younger generations who grew under the influence of disappointed, entertainment driven parents whose disbelief in politicians and economical system influenced the younger people to just not care. Following the words of Bart and Lisa Simpson – “We’re the MTV Generation. We feel neither highs nor lows.” Well, they couldn’t be farther from the truth – this generation simply lacked the necessary tools and influential peer to actually push towards a more civic mind..

This is where Social Tools pop in. From Facebook groups oriented towards a cause – the Breast Cancer Research counts up to 3,000,000 members – to the amount of topics related to politics in sites such as Digg – in which you could count at least 5-10 topics related to politics and the current Hillary/Obama struggle in the US – young people, influenced by a World after 9/11 are just looking for the right cause to make the World a better place. From politics to ecological trends, there is a soul search to make amends for the mistakes of former generations.

This is not something new. In fact, numerous studies have already mentioned this “nostalgia” trend for better days in the younger generations – a hermetical circle of reinterpretation of society in the eager eyes of believers. What comes as something to be considered is the role Social tools took. Young people weren’t expecting a Big Brother to emerge and tell them what’s right – they were looking for the right Forum to discuss their topics without the obvious moderation of an higher figure, where they would be given the right to judge and tell right from wrong. And guess what – they do know the difference.

And why is this important for marketers? 3 simple lessons:

I have to say it’s easy and convenient; you decide the applications boxes that you want to keep or store, and your extended profile can be edited any time from your profile page.

How simple??? If only all things online could be this simple. Not wanting to go into a rant about complicated things, but I think Facebook have delivered that first building block of a solution to a problem, whereby if everything was approached in this way it would make the online world one of sheer ease.

I will try to adopt the Facebook “simplicity” model when proposing any online solution!

OK, so a good question – if you do not want to lose weight, why would you care about the existence of this website? Quite simply because Social Networking is the big fad – specially for Brands who want to get into the Hype. But most of them want to create a “community” – without doing an actual filter of the types of contents as they do not want to limit the user’s interactions. But sometimes, filtering the nature of the SNW functionalities the Brand wants to place is the right way to go – by applying a longtail approach to the SNW business, Brands can create a SNW dedicated to their own purposes. Take into account the Absolut example – a website focused on Co-Creation that has a simple Social Networking functionality but is a success case when considering the Brand engagement it created. If you have a good concept for your Brand, do not settle for generic applications – search for a specific approach inside your concept and make sure the user has a reason to engage in the Social Networking tools you provided them. Otherwise, they just might as well just go to Facebook…