Stritar's chronolog

Daft Punk, Arrested Development, and how content is becoming an experience

Wed, 15 May 2013 07:32:28 GMT

What a great year for content! In October 2012, Red Bull Stratos set a benchmark for what can be done with branded content. The jump was watched live on YouTube by 8 million people. A few months later, Gangam style established a new standard for how far online virality can take you. It became the first video to reach 1 billion views on YouTube. Powered by the internet. These two extreme cases probably won't be topped for quite some time (internet time, that is) and are clear leaders in their categories. But lately, I've noticed two other great examples that clearly show something else - where commercial content (promotion) is headed. It's all about delivering experiences, which are created and amplified by digital marketing.

Daft Punk

I've never ever seen so much buzz about a release of a new album. Ok, my streams aren't filled with information about Biebers and Gagas, so I can't tell what's happening there, but I'm sure Daft Punk won big time. The crazy release that's been going on for months, with teaser videos, song loops, weird promotions and shitloads of publicity. Facebook, Twitter or Reddit, Daft Punk seem to be all over the place, and everybody was trying to be the first to publish the link to the stream or download of Random Access Memories. The first single from the album already received more than 23 million views on YouTube (in 6 weeks), and the song is number 1 in many countries, besides breaking Spotify streaming records. What a comeback!

Arrested Development

Some of you may have heard about Arrested Development. It's one of those shows that got cancelled after only a few seasons, but kept a strong fan base that was waiting for years for a movie to be made. Then, the mighty Netflix came around, and something even better than a movie happened. Season 4, with the original cast! The trailer that launched a few days ago already has more than a million views, which is a lot compared to the 3.5 million who watched season 3 finale. Awesome stuff, can't wait to see it.

So what

A music album with lots of supporting content and infinite publicity, a TV show with a loyal army of geeks? These two cases are more alike than it seems at first sight. They both offer more than the content itself, they offer experiences. They are both fueled by the internet. They are both children of online virality.

Google search trends for Daft Punk and Arrested Development peaked in the past days.

Daft Punk gave us a something that goes beyond an album, they gave us a complete story that's funky, appealing and mysterious (and filled with 80s revival and robots). Netflix will be fulfilling a fantasy that we've been having for years, and they will make us come like never before. The complete season (15 parts, 8.5 hours) will be available at once, so fans will be able to watch it in one peace! The US internet will surely be consumed by Netflix on May 26th.

Do you see what's happening? Everything, even (commercial) content, is becoming an experience. Otherwise, it's overlooked in the sea of information overload.

UPDATE (16.6.2013): It seems Arrested Development's transmedia experience is getting more interesting. Yesterday evening, one of the most fascinating characters in the series, dr. Tobias Fünke, got it's own sizzle reel and website, promoting his acting skills. Great stuff.

Sempl 14 key takeaways: top trends in (digital) marketing

Tue, 04 Dec 2012 07:35:00 GMT

The 14th media trends seminar Sempl took place last week in Portorož. This year, I had an opportunity to attend the conference, since Neolab provided the official Twitter wall. And I was glad I could, because Sempl proved itself as an event worth visiting, packed with high profile speakers and marketers not only from Slovenia, but from the entire region. Most lectures were very interesting, and the fascinating fact is that they all went into the same direction. It seems mobile, social and local are so mainstream, they are not even put into the spotlight anymore. But here are the things that were.

Content

Forget classic marketing, it doesn't work (online) anymore. Ads don't work with social, and they don't work with mobile. Advertisers now have to go beyond "YeDiLi" (Yell Disrupt Lie) concept and deliver better, more complete experiences wrapper around their brands. Content marketing within the right context is the what keeps the consumers engaged and loyal, and some brands are already removing their products from their web pages, replacing them with editorial and social content.

Storytelling

Content is crucial, but so is the experience for consumers, which can be delivered using storytelling. People want to be seduced, they need to have the feeling they are a part of a bigger picture, specially if they have the chance join the conversation and the ability to co-create the experience. Storytelling is what helps to keep them engaged with a brand and share their loyalty with their peers.

Futurist Gerd Leonhard delivering his lecture "The total reset of marketing, branding and media"

Second screen

While television still rules the media budgets, more and more people stick to their phones while watch it. Enter the age of the second screen, provided by tablets and smartphones. This is probably one of the biggest opportunities for marketers to deliver all of the above, since these little capable devices support so many things. The ads of the future will be multi-channel interactive experiences, watched on many screens at once. Transmedia FTW.

bonus: the new Shazam is awesome

The platform that fully embraces all of the mentioned concepts has to be the new Shazam. You know that app that recognizes the song you are listening to? Now it can also understand which TV show you are watching, and delivers additional content that comes with it. Cast, trivia, products on screen, etc. One of the best cases that were presented was by Red Bull, which enables watching a snowboard movie with multiple cameras. Crazy shit!

These are the most significant digital marketing trends presented on the conference. Are you already thinking about your next move? Here are the slides from the conference to help you on your way.

Dear Twitter, please reconsider this madness

Tue, 21 Aug 2012 15:01:53 GMT

Dear Twitter. You were always one of my favorites. I love it how you managed to create a subculture, something that Facebook will never be able to do. You've allowed people to collectively create information that travels the world in seconds. Your role in many global activist projects is invaluable, and your stance on privacy issues something that inspires the world. You help us find out about things before they actually happen. When the Icelandic volcano was erupting in 2010, I was watching the #ashtag word clouds being broadcasted live on CNN. It was then that it struck me that the media will never be the same again, the power of thousands reporters wins every time. You made it to the mainstream, shaped transmedia into Twitter + television. You were becoming the ultimate foundation for real-time information. You made me realize so many things by being one of the most prominent platforms of the social era. You were the man.

And now you are starting to kill the platform.

Anyone who's read What Would Google Do? would know this is a huge mistake. This book (from 2009!) has a chapter about the value of platforms and distributed systems, and I've been obsessing myself with this revelation ever since. Wrote a blog post about it, which was retweeted by the book's author Jeff Jarvis himself, and it made me even more in love with the idea. Now I'm sure platforms are the future, because they have the ability to outlast services.

The most important things about platforms are the ecosystems around them. Yours was always more appealing to me than Facebook's. Because of the information Twitter has (almost all of it public), because of the culture that's emerged around this information. Twitterers, Developers, even Lurkers and Ninjas, the amount of innovative things that people have managed to build around your core is amazing. Not just silly games and marketing schemes, actually valuable and inspiring things (we've tried it too!). I always believed you were cooler than Facebook, that you have a brighter future, since you weren't trying to keep people inside your services. You seemed to know what made you in the first place.

I understand it's the high level mashups you are interested in, but still, the platform is the most important thing you have. Why not let other people reinvent your user experience, like others are trying to reinvent email? You want that, you want people to make Twitter whatever they want, while creating, consuming and curating the data that's inside you. You need thousand of different clients that feed your infinite hunger, enabling you to build your business model around the tweets that are generated. You want developers to use, abuse and reshape your essence. Because platforms are like networks, there value grows exponentially with the number of nodes they have, and these nodes help platforms evolve even further, in unimaginable ways.

And now you are trying to kill bits of this platform, those bits that help create the most valuable thing you have - hundreds of millions of Tweets every day. They may be just Twitter clients, but they might as well be the most important thing you've ever had. Your fans, your supporters, your ambassadors, your army, your ecosystem. Your future is more important than your monetization, not just to me and to them, to everybody who loves what you are, and to those who don't get you. Your future is important to mankind. That's why you should stay what you were meant to be. You should stay the open platform.

Television and Social media? How did my recommendation engine miss this connection?

Sun, 27 Nov 2011 14:58:20 GMT

November has been a great month for this blog. For the first time in history, I managed to get more than 1.000 unique users on two different blog posts in a single month. Which is awesome, thanks! The first post was about the TV show Dexter and its Facebook game Slice of life. The other was about Slovenian TV show Soočenje and its buzz on Twitter. Just two posts, nothing special, right? Wrong. It's really obvious, but I missed it somehow. Both posts are talking about combining television and social media, silly me! I can't believe I failed to see it, but I did, and so did my blog. Not that it really matters anymore. You know those fantastic coincidences that happen sometimes and put everything into place? This story is full of them.

Function

Some of you may know this blog has an internal recommendation engine that calculates the correlation between different posts based on shared tags and their frequency, offering related reading in the bottom. It missed the connection. Others may know I'm a bit obsessed with cross-referencing my posts, which I do manually. I missed it too. Perhaps Facebook and Twitter aren't as similar as I would like to believe, but I'm putting my bet mostly on the different concepts of combining television and social media. The Dexter case was about entertainment, gaming and story-telling. Pop TV's case was about politics, news and ordinary people co-creating content. Different problem, different tags, but still, the strong relation between the two is very much there.

Try

The first funny coincidence was a blog post by @anejmehadzic written a few days after mine, discussing the general possibilities of a symbiosis between television and social media (in Slovene). The post provided enough insight to make me see what I missed. TV shows using Facebook, Twitter and YouTube to provide additional content to viewers was really something in between the two cases of mine. Revelation. At this point I knew I missed the connection myself, but how did my very smart algorithm also miss it?

Catch

The next lucky coincidence was a lecture on wwwh happening yet a few days later. @zbrchka was talking about transmedia, a term I haven't heard about before. I thought multi-platform or cross-platform could be concept that connected these two blog posts, but transmedia feels so much better. Transmedia is a technique for creating integrated content for different mediums, just the thing what I was looking for. Something that's becoming so important it deserves exposure on this blog too.

Finally

With the new gathered knowledge, I made a new tag Transmedia, putting it on both posts, besides the one about Šport TV tweeting about the basketball championship. It worked like a charm. Since this tag is used so rarely, it dominated the recommendation engine, and to my great relief, all three posts gained the correlation they require to be listed as related content one to another.

The blogosphere kicks ass, since bloggers are mutually inspiring each other and moving things forward. Wwwh is a great place to hang out and share knowledge and experience. My recommendation algorithm is awesome, fully working as expected. And those lucky coincidences are a thing that make this existence an interesting place to be visiting. Everything is just the way it should be.

* try-catch-finally is a an exception handling syntax used in some programming languages.

Supporting events on Twitter: how Pop TV and Soočenje owned the Slovenian Twitterverse

Sun, 20 Nov 2011 10:13:58 GMT

Supporting events on Twitter is becoming very popular, and it's a perfect case study of what Twitter can do. After all, this channel allows an additional layer for following things that are going on in real-life, in real-time. Coverage sometimes happens accidentally, if there are enough Twitterers around, but more and more often, it happens as a result of a carefully planned tactic of those behind the event. Only then it can fully work, enabling organizers, participants and observers a totally new type of involvement. Crowdsourcing event support can produce a better overview of what's happening than any well-trained team of journalists can provide, offering an experience that is broad, objective and subjective, interactive. And like using Twitter itself, some know how to do it, and some don't.

My experience

When I tried it out it myself, it was fun and rewarding, In May, Trkaj, Jacuzzy and our neighborhood Savska held a festival Blok Party, which attracted a lot of people. We were there, live-tweeting about it. We've also asked other Twitterers (thanks @loudandwicked!), who attended the festival, to use and amplify the same hashtag #savska, and in the end, more than 10 people tweeted about the event, producing over 50 tweets, most of them with pictures. Which isn't that bad on the Slovenian scale. My friend @jakasibicekaka did something similar, asking Trbovlje town councillors to tweet about a meeting with the #sejaOStrb hashtag, which attracted other people to participate as well (here's his blog post about it, in Slovene). Great results enabled by collaboration of many users.

It can work on a small scale. What about the major league, it should be even better? Let's analyze two nation-wide events that happened this week in Slovenia.

How to do it wrong

The first case mentioned was the Slovenia vs. USA friendly soccer match. At the stadium, the National soccer association (@nzs_si) promoted their Twitter account which does live coverage of matches. Which they did. But that doesn't mean they did the whole Twitter thing right. They forgot about the extremely witty journalist @IEBergant also tweeting about the match. They forgot about me, and they forgot about you and 8 other thousand people watching the game live, probably quite a few geeks included. While NZS used the hashtag #fuzbal (slang for soccer), some used the hashtag #nogomet (soccer), #slovenia, #slovenija, and the mentioned Igor Evgen Bergant used #soccerSI-US. The results: a scattered pool of tweets which didn't really offer users the complete picture. The event went mostly unnoticed on Twitter.

The Slovenian soccer association promoting their Twitter account on the match

How to do it right

On the other hand, Pop TV (@24ur), the biggest commercial television network in Slovenia, did it more than right. Their show "Predvolilna soočenja", which does political confrontations before the upcoming elections, won big time. And while using Twitter to support television has been done for ages abroad, this actually happened for the first time in Slovenia (at least so I think). And they did at least three smart things:

they've promoted the hashtag #soocenje, not minding about their Twitter profile
they've invited five influential Twitterers (@alivea, @had, @Lacn, @madpixel, @tamejhna) to the studio audience to generate the initial buzz on Twitter, besides live-tweeting from the studio. Here they are, appearing with @miharejc, who tweets for @24ur
they've broadcasted a selection of tweets with this hashtag live on television, and encouraged people to participate and ask questions on Twitter

The results were amazing. Hundreds, if not thousands of tweets all over place. Local trending topic. They owned the Slovenian Twitterverse like no one else before them. It worked like a charm. You can check out the partial report (which only displays 100 of #soocenje tweets, happening in 5 minutes!) on the following link or use the #soocenje Twitter search, if tweets are still available. Epic stuff, moving the Slovenian media sphere a few years forward.

Pop TV displaying and promoting #soocenje tweets live on television

#soocenje (besides various politicians and the show host) became a local trending topic in Slovenia according to sitweet.com

Conclusion

I'm only a level 26 27 social media ninja, but I know a few things. If you're organizing an event, the most important thing is: promote Twitter hashtags, not profiles. Even if they are nothing more than just clickable search queries, they simply work. Search Twitter in real-time and look for people who are talking about the event. Ask them and other people attending to amplify and use the same hashtag. Thank them if they do. Most of them will join you, since it'll make it more interesting for them too. Offer something more if you can (like displaying tweets on a website). Use multiple accounts (official, personal) with different wibes. Upload pictures. Retweet. Interact. Have fun.

Twitter, a funny service proving that a collective effort of many people will always provide a way more interesting picture than a single person can. More objective, more diversified, more everything. Perhaps even better than the original event itself. Real players are fully aware of that. Don't worry, even if you don't have the same power, publicity and followers, you can compensate with additional energy, time and mobile bandwidth. The results can be surprising. And if it does work, I promise you'll enjoy every little bit of it.

UPDATE (22.11.2011): I got contacted by @24ur, who told me this was already their second Soočenje show (I missed the first one - the irony - playing soccer), and the first one generated over 1800 #soocenje tweets. I also got feedback from @nzs_si and @IEBergant, they've agreed we should make a joint effort the next time Slovenia plays soccer, also involving the biggest Slovenian soccer portal Nogomania. Awesome stuff.

UPDATE (25.11.2011): Pop TV is on fire. Today, they've added another medium to support Soočenje on Twitter, their news portal 24ur.com, which is the most visited site in Slovenia.

Is Dexter and its social game Slice of Life the future of TV shows (but no one noticed)?

Sun, 06 Nov 2011 15:46:35 GMT

I don't know if you've noticed, but a few months ago the hit television show Dexter got it's own social game you can play on Facebook, named Slice of Life. Similar kinds of branded social games have been done before, but it's something else that's interesting this time. This game changes according to the plot of the television series each week. That's right, the show and the game are coexisting and evolving together to bring users a totally new type of experience. And while most technology blogs, obsessed with social, said Slice of Life is a revolutionary new type of a social game, I asked myself: is it rather a new revolutionary type of consuming television?

Television is static - not interactive the way the Web is. You can't do much. More or less, liking and commenting shows, besides tele voting, are the most interactive things you can do. But Slice of Life changes everything. A television show that you can watch, consume and play on multiple mediums, multiple channels, multiple platforms, online and offline. You're actually playing a game inside the show. Or watching a show inside the game. Pretty awesome stuff that didn't get as nearly much attention as it should, attention for bringing a new type of interactivity to television shows.

If the future of television as a medium will be defined by new types of business models (Netflix), physical architecture (Google?) and user experience (Apple?), the future of television content will definitely be defined by the level of interactivity it offers, imitating the Web. And until now, interactivity hasn't been solved in such a smart way than our favorite serial killer's social game. You must watch, you must play, you must do everything to be the biggest of the 10 million+ fans Dexter has on Facebook.

It looks like television is becoming more than just a medium. It's rather evolving into a cross-platform interactive content serving entertainment system. Some have already managed to successfully understand that fact, more will follow soon. I don't know about you, but I can't wait to see more.

Forget Facebook. Šport TV and their billboards found Twitter, with style.

Sun, 18 Sep 2011 20:59:14 GMT

About two months ago I was super fascinated about the fact that a variety of Slovene marketers started to promote their Facebook presence on billboards. Guess what: that's so two months ago. Šport TV, one of the biggest sports television networks in Slovenia went a step further, designing their billboard(s) specifically for promoting their coverage of The European basketball championships on Twitter. Which is a bit surprising, since there are supposedly only around 10k people on Twitter in Slovenia (compared to 650k on Facebook), but still, Twitter is much more suited for media coverage than Facebook for various reasons.

The massive billboard I spotted is located on one of the biggest intersections in Ljubljana, and it's made out of three pieces. The main piece contains three celebrity basketball commentators, each one represented with his own Twitter account and a "Follow me" call to action. Until now, these profiles managed to attract around 150 followers each, which isn't bad at all. Their Twitter backgrounds are well designed and their streams almost updated, which will hopefully continue even after the championship:

Sašo Filipovski: SportTV_Saso
Zoran Martič: SportTV_Zoran
Zmago Sagadin: SportTV_Zmago

Šport TV continued the campaign on their website, where they presented the same three commentators, besides promoting the hashtag #Litva2011, which is quite popular these days for Slovene standards. Pretty advanced and coherent marketing indeed. Great job.

The championship will be over today, Slovenia did well and managed to finish 7th, but we also went a step further in digital. Yes, Twitter is finally becoming a player and some people obviously know how to use it. Exposing the actual faces behind the corporations is effective (specially if you are in showbiz), and something that is nearly impossible to do well on Facebook. So this campaign is actually a double win. Just don't forget to update.

Šport TV's Eurobasket billboard

Šport TV billboard: Follow us

Šport TV billboard: Facebook and Twitter

Šport TV website highlight

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