blog

The Internet continues to change the way we create & consume, but sometimes the new modes are not so new.

During the Renaissance portrait painting became popular – commissioned paintings of individuals, groups and families showing them in situ with the intent of capturing the visual appearance of the subject. It first became common among noble families, royalty and church leaders looking to have their greatness preserved for the ages, but it later became less exclusive and in the 18th and 19th centuries it’s popularity took off among middle class families.

During the 20th century portrait painting suffered a decline, largely due to the ease of photography as a method of capturing a likeness, but also because western society’s taste moved away from crafted goods to the mass produced. Painted portraits felt provincial, much like hand made furniture in the era of Ikea.

This trend had begun before Gutenberg and had the great benefit of progressively providing the masses with access to books, porcelain, transport, art, plastic, electronics, music, theatre and the Internet.

A combination of economic forces (mass-market, mass-distribution, mass-production) and the popularity of mega-brands squeezed artists out of the mainstream. The role of the craftsman, artisan and artist was greatly reduced and displaced by the factory worker, mechanic and miner and eventually by the programmer, management consultant and life coach.

Slowly bespoke artefacts have taken on a new meaning, a hand made chair became a sign of wealth rather than poverty. But for the mass-market, mass-production is it. Artists either make it big and became superstars or struggle to gain recognition. The traditional middle ground for the common artist has been lost.

One of the trends being enabled by the Internet is the breakdown of the economic factors that have caused this polarisation. Production, marketing, shipping and transactions are being commoditised and it is becoming viable for individuals to create and reach a market without having to pitch their ideas to companies with worldwide distribution and marketing clout.

Want to publish a book? Go to blurb.com and self publish. Want to market a line of unique lamps? Put them on etsy.com and buy some AdWords. Want to get exposure for your new single? Post a killer video on YouTube (10 million views in under a month, no major record label backing).

The flip side of this coin is that the market is seeking out unique, short run or hand-made products again. Sites like Threadless.com changed the way we look at T-shirts from being a vehicle for logos to a vehicle for creativity and self expression. The value people place on mass produced objects such as CDs is falling – but there is plenty of value seen in unique or limited release material.

My family recently commissioned a portrait from Nan Lawson. It wasn’t expensive and the whole transaction, from initial contact to feedback on a couple of iterations to the final payment, was conducted over the Internet. We love the personal nature of the portrait, the way it captures us, our tastes and the our time, but most of all I’m excited that the Internet is enabling a renaissance of commissioned creativity on this scale.

Ace Buchan rips it up!

It’s not often that surfing is seen as a sport that is at the forefront of cutting-edge technologies and events coverage. Viewers tune in seasonally to high-profile Australian sports such as NRL, Tennis and Cricket on television and are presented with a barrage of new technologies, camera angles, stats analysis and heat mapping, so it’s easy to see why many see these sports as industry leaders in their field. On the contrary however, surfing is often overlooked within this realm, often appearing on channels such as FuelTV which are less accessible to the everyday Australian viewer.

Before the emergence of online as “mainstream”, surfing fans often waited days or weeks to view images and results of recent surfing titles. Surfing, by nature, is not a spectator sport. Events are often held in remote locations,  held offshore and are notorious for sporadic consistency as the date/time of competing is determined by swell, wind, and waves. Print titles such as “Tracks” became the bible for surfing fans who read these magazines religiously for their only fix of their favourite sport.

In recent years, however, Pro Surfing and affiliated sponsors have exploited the online medium with resounding success, creating online communities with a high level of engagement, greater incentives and results for sponsors and marketers, live streaming facilities and a “surfing on demand” culture that is now accessible to a very wide audience.

By using the web to reach their fans, the ASP found that they could use smaller, more compact recording equipment for live event streaming online, that sponsors were willing to utilise their own websites to broadcast events which diversified the channels to content, and that online communities were forming globally where surfers and surfing fans finally had a medium to engage with each other on a mass scale.

With online as their primary broadcasting medium, unlike traditional sporting events coverage, opportunities were unlocked for marketers looking to tap into a previously distant audience.

Sponsors broadcasting events and results on their own websites via live streaming facilities, as recently seen in the Quiksilver Pro, were effectively creating website retention whereby viewers of the event were simultaneously exposed to their brand, their products and call to action, all without the use of expensive commercials and marketing collateral associated with traditional broadcasting. Users could easily navigate to the online shop and buy a pair of boardshorts or a surfboard while waiting for the next surfer to hit the waves, all without leaving their laptops, let alone the sponsor’s website.

The websites for these brands suddenly became useful, as users would flock back event after event to watch their favourite sports stars (and maybe purchase some surfing gear while they happened to be there). When events aren’t on, users can still pop back to the websites to see the latest stats and rankings on their favourite surfers, or blog posts from their surfers on tour. The ASP and associated sponsors suddenly made a previously inaccessible sport with limited marketing opportunities into a marketing empire by following online trends and showing innovation in terms of online branding, a hurdle that most modern sports are yet to achieve.

With the rise of social media, pro surfing has now extended to broad online communities which facilitate engagement with their fans. Facebook has been widely utilised to reach these audiences with great success, and all under the umbrella of corporate organisations. Unheard of right? While many users of facebook are reluctant to support corporations online, surfing has managed to cut through the stereotype of companies moving into the online space trying to “sell” by becoming a resource to fans of surfing and facilitating conversations between like-minded people. Following this year’s Quiksilver Pro, Quiksilver’s facebook page now has 280,000 followers and counting, not to mention a corresponding Twitter account with 10,365 followers. Brands such as Oakley have now been utilising iPhone applications to continue to tap into this emerging market. The possibilities are now endless.

While many sports are still at the forefront of traditional broadcasting, it’s interesting to analyse whether this is the best approach to “innovative” sports coverage. Looking at Pro Surfing as a case study, it’s important to see the value they have created utilising the online/mobile medium in attracting and retaining sponsorship and funding from almost nothing. Their willingness to use the web as their primary engagement point has had amazing success, and should be seen as a benchmark for sporting coverage and engagement going forward.

Beats having a rotating banner at the side of the football field, don’tcha think?

Successful online businesses and organisations all have one thing in common: they are useful for their users.

Whether a user returns to your website to buy, learn, share, converse, donate, research or be entertained is purely determined by the purpose of your website. Whatever the angle of your online presence, a common need is visible: retention.

For organisations to remain relevant within the online space, they will need to adapt to both emerging technologies and shifting consumer behaviour. Those who will succeed need to focus on the premise of immediate access to content, cultural relevance, personalisation and interactivity.

The future of the web and associated technologies lies in the notion of immediate access to content. Within the online sphere, accessibility and the “what you want, when you want it” motto are at the forefront of best practice and imply openness, transparency and relevancy.

Diversifying channels to content to provide a richer user experience and facilitate an interactive relationship with the user is recommended. This includes the provision of videos, visual messaging of content, podcasting, vodcasting, virtual tours, downloadable resources, user-generated content, the ability to share content, pushing content to social media and the creation of personalisation and community through the tailored presentation of content to the user. The provision of multilingual content is also a key driver to accessibility and implied openness.

Our recommended approach is that our clients work alongside Gruden in establishing a digital roadmap for the future of their website.

By doing so, we identify how the website and other digital channels should fit into our client’s overall strategic direction, how these channels can be moulded to be more relevant to users, and set them on a clear path for online-driven growth over an extended period of time. It provides us with a benchmark by which strategic goals and online activities can be set, tracked and monitored, in a continual process of improvement based on the underlying principle of strategy: Where are we now? Where do we want to be? How do we get there? Are we there yet?

This process ensures that the website remains alive and relevant, a centralised hub of dynamic content, growing organically with the needs of the client and their users: their URL is no longer a website, it’s a resource.

Interactivity is a key driver in maintaining relevancy to your audience. Several years ago, a website known as the Big Red Button demonstrated the power of interactivity to retain visitors to a website. The button asked visitors not to push; visitors felt compelled to push; and each successive push rewarded the visitor with entertaining responses. It successfully invited interaction and helped give rise to viral marketing.

Additionally, user-generated content is a growing phenomenon online. In the words of Mark Pollard, the basic premise that content=conversation=content: don’t use social media, let social media use you, rings true in today’s online environment. Our user-generated content campaigns for Disney Channel Australia such as  Hannah Montana are proven examples of the success of this medium.

The White House run an online blog which encourages the sharing of content, as well as links to their various online social media channels.

Gruden have developed customised social media channels for many of our clients, with the premise of opening up multiple channels to content and allowing people to access content specific to their interests via social media hub’s of their choice. Such an example can be seen at: www.youtube.com/skillsdmc. Additionally, the Sydney Opera House has implemented this with great success: www.youtube.com/sydneyoperahouse.

The key to creating and sustaining an online brand is in building experiences and creating a link between the physical and digital world. An experience which is both personal and interactive will engage the end user and transform your online presence from a website into a resource. However, it is important to understand that the underlying foundation of defining which experiences will be successful is strategy, and this must be clearly defined through a digital roadmap before any key recommendations can be made as to how to achieve your online goals.

Additionally, it’s important to recognise that a website is a living thing. It is vital that you constantly measure your online goals via analytics and review the initial KPI’s established at the project’s onset. By doing so, you can identify areas of the site that aren’t quite hitting the mark and capitalise on those areas that are deemed successful.  It’s important to validate the project’s success by measuring it against your initial objectives, and ensuring that content is constantly refreshed and revisited.

The success of Apple’s iPhone app store has led to a stampede of brands creating games, services, and other applications as marketing tools. It’s an entirely new platform for most, and it is quickly becoming a powerful way to influence consumers. More and more, our clients are asking our advice on the value of  iPhone apps. How do you decide if having one is a good idea for your organisation?

I came across a great article on BNET highlighting the five key strategies for making a smart application. The full article is distilled from a Forrester Research report on the topic, and is a useful starting point for any marketer looking to engage a digital agency such as Gruden to build an application for their business.

In brief, their key recommendations are to:

1. Make it Useful
2. Make it Interactive
3. Make it Entertaining
4. Make it a Mixture (Combining Utility and Intractivity)
5. Make it Free

However, before even embarking on the iPhone application discussion, it’s important to set out your key marketing goals to see if an iPhone application would assist with the realisation of these goals. It’s not very useful long-term to take up the “I’ll have what she’s having” approach if it’s not engaging your consumers.

The key question to ask yourself is what you are trying to accomplish.  Are you trying to build brand affinity? Engage customers? Drive people to a physical location? A web site perhaps? There are many options, and many different ways to address these goals using various digital channels.

Additionally, look at the break down of your market segment and see what percentage of your audience are utilising iPhones. You may be surprised to find that many of them use other brands of smart phones, such as the Blackberry. In this instance, you’d be looking to build a completely different type of application. A majority of your audience may not even be using smart phones at all.

The Forrester Report, ‘Matching iPhone Capabilities to Customer Goals’, comments:

Simply building these richer experiences doesn’t ensure success. Companies looking to harness the power of these devices must design experiences that match appropriate device capabilities with user goals. To design successful mobile data experiences, companies must understand how people want to use mobile data channels, fit those data channels into multi-channel scenarios, and focus on their strongest capability — timeliness.

Don’t get me wrong, iPhone applications have been used by hundreds of companies in recent months to achieve outstanding marketing and branding results, and there’s nothing that turns a Gruden developer on more than getting the chance to show off the rich user experience they can create for mobile users.

Kraft’s iFood assistant, for example, combines both utility and interactivity. The application suggests recipes, lets users upload their own and share them, and assists users in creating shopping lists. Other apps by brands such as Target allow users to find bargains and locate their nearest shop.

At the end of the day, focus on strategy.

With the array of new, innovative technologies and marketing channels which have opened up within the last few years, it’s easy to get carried away in an attempt to stay ahead of the game. It’s important to set your key marketing objectives first and then match the appropriate medium by which you engage with your consumers, rather than the other way around.

It still amazes me today how fast this shift has changed the way we communicate. This is a fascinating look into the changes within the digital sphere in the last 12 months alone, and a fantastic summary of the magnitude of the social media revolution. If you have 5 minutes, I highly recommend taking the time to watch the video below.

On the 19th June Google held a whole-day developer event at their Pyrmont office to showcase their new Google Wave technology and Gruden were lucky enough to be invited along.

The Day

As interesting as the technology – was the format used to showcase it.

The day started with a couple of short talks introducing the Google Waves system, the various pieces that make up the whole and Google’s vision for the technology. The 80 odd developers were then broken into small groups, each accompanied by a couple of Googlers and taken off to various corners of Google’s amazing Sydney offices for a lunch and informal Q&A.

The second half of the day was dominated by the hackathon – the idea here was for the developers to work together or alone on some wave related development of their choosing. During this extended period it seemed that the entire Wave team were on hand for discussion, brain storming, feedback and assistance. The documentation guy was there to hear how documentation could be improved, the Python API girl was immediately on hand to answer my App Engine questions, the UX guy was closely observing how people interacted with Wave and where they had troubles, the Java team were recompiling the API server to include additional dependencies. This level of interaction seemed to be a great way for the Wave team to learn how people are going to approach their product and a great way to help the developers who turned up to get up and running quickly. It was also great to see the level of talent we have locally – Google maps was developed in Sydney and it’s this same team that are behind Wave.

The hackathon culminated in people demonstrating their days’ work live in front of the group over traditional geek fare of beer & pizza. There were nearly 30 demos ranging from GPS hacks to games of connect 4 and hangman to bots that could define terms and tell you what is next on TV. The winner on the night was a shared white-boarding app implemented in Flash.

What is Google Wave?

There is no simple way to explain it. The most succinct explanation is possibly phrased as a question – if email was to be re-invented today, from the ground up, what would it look like? And by “from the ground up” we’re talking client, server, protocol, the lot.

At a fundamental level, Wave is an open protocol specification. The idea is that, as with email, a variety of companies will develop competing clients (eg. Outlook, Hotmail, Mail.app, Thunderbird) and servers (eg. Exchange, Postfix, Courier) based on the Wave specification.

On a more practical level Wave is email, real-time chat and collaborative content editing & versioning rolled into one. It allows for multiple people to communicate in real time using text and rich content, while retaining the full history of the conversation and the ability to browse backwards and forwards through this history.

Wave also incorporates a framework for developers to create gadgets (client side mini-apps that run within a wave) and robots (server side applications that interact with waves in various ways).

In Google’s own words:

Google Wave is a product that helps users communicate and collaborate on the web. A “wave” is equal parts conversation and document, where users can almost instantly communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more. Google Wave is also a platform with a rich set of open APIs that allow developers to embed waves in other web services and to build extensions that work inside waves.

- http://code.google.com/apis/wave/

If you want to know more about Google Wave there is a fairly lengthy video of it’s unveiling during the keynote of the Google IO conference a few weeks back. This video contains a number of interesting demonstrations.

There are also a number of online resources depending on whether you are interested in the back story, the big picture, the APIs or the protocol.

Will Google Wave change the world?

Maybe, but not any time soon. The protocols that we all depend on to send and receive email were initially developed in the early 80’s and while things move a lot faster now they still years to mature and get adopted.

Google Wave represents a major paradigm shift for end users to get their heads around which is not helped by the fact that it currently has serious usability issues. It is also very much in early beta – crashes are not uncommon and it needs some serious optimisation to avoid causing browsers to occasionally hang. Most of the time these are friendly and just require browser refreshes, but they are frequent.

But for all this it is an incredible step forward at many levels and it addresses many of the current shortfalls in current modes of digital communication. Google have shown they can address performance and usability issues in their products, so the extent to which Google open up and allow competition will probably be the deciding factor in Wave’s success.

Thanks to Jan Vaughan for the great photos

Last week at the Public Sphere #2 conference in Canberra, the Minister for Finance and Deregulation, Lindsay Tanner, helped launch the new Government 2.0 Taskforce.

The taskforce’s objectives are to:

• make government information more accessible and usable
• establish a pro-disclosure culture
• leverage the views, knowledge and resources of the general community
• build a culture of online innovation within Government

“Let us imagine a scenario to illustrate the point.

You are thinking of buying a house.

You go online and using mapping data you access the suburb you are thinking of moving into.

With just a few clicks you are able to access information about schools, parks, child care centres and aged care facilities in the area.

You are able to see whether crime is rising or falling in the area, how fast the local public transport services will take you to work, and how congested the roads are at 8am on a weekday morning.

With a few more clicks you are able to join an online forum about the quality of the local schools, and about the pros and cons of living in the area.

Then, after you have moved in, you are able to go online to tell your local councillor, MP or government agency that a nearby road is full of potholes and dangerous to drive on.

This scenario is not far-fetched. We are moving toward it by the day.”

- Lindsay Tanner.

Needless to say, this is an initiative that Gruden fully supports. We have worked closely with government on numerous projects and understand both the challenges and opportunities of putting public sector information online. Having a cross government body responsible for informing and empowering those at the coal face has the potential to really drive openness and interaction and we look forward to doing even more innovative work.

Further information on the taskforce, its scope and aims as well are available at http://gov2.net.au/about/.