Tuesday, November 11th, 2008
Hope you enjoyed yesterday’s rare political edition of Links For The Week, it’s back to the regular stuff.
Tribes
- There was an allusion to “Tribes” a couple of times in yesterday’s post, listen to Seth Godin talk about it for more than an hour in this special edition of the Marketing Over Coffee podcast. It took me a long time to finish it because my daily commute is five minutes, but so worth it.
Generation Y, Digital Natives & Millennials
- Workplace 2.0: Motivating and Managing Millennials – Very short (12 pages total, about 8 pages of content) PDF file on managing millennials (aka: us). It doesn’t actually give much of a “how to”, but it does lead you to understanding us more. I must say he is right on about fervour, hard work and tireless labour. I’d work overtime, for free, for a job that’s rewarding in an industry I’m passionate about.
- Digital Natives are here by Mitch Joel – Again, great post to help the people in management understand the digital natives. I feel a lot of people still aren’t ready to accept that our generation is a little bit different and that being constantly connected is more of an empowerment than a distraction. But those organisations who do grasp that, are going to be able to channel us much more efficiently.
Social Media Strategy
- The Strategist and Social Media by Kami Huyse – Great slides in there that you should read if you’re beginning to think of a social media strategy, especially points about risks of social media engagement, and the Sea World case study.
Plurk
Google Reader
Music & Social Media
- MTV to MySpace: Post Our Content, Please – you might remember in my review of the book/rant Cult Of The Amateur by Andrew Keen that he called Viacom (parent company of MTV) suing YouTube a “powerful message”. I say the partnership between MTV and MySpace is a) a more powerful message b) a sign that at least one player in the industry waking up to reality.
As always, share your links with me in the comments, or you can find me on delicious.
Tags: andrew keen, apple, beth harte, cult of the amateur, delicious, digital natives, generation y, google reader, itunes sucks, kami huyse, links for the week, marketing over coffee, millennials, mitch joel, mtv, myspace, obama, Plurk, read it later, risks of social media engagement, sea world, seth godin, social media strategy, tribes, viacom, youtube
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Friday, November 7th, 2008
So Pat Law invited me to do a little collaboration with her (her post here) inspired by this post featuring a brand-timeline portrait. And one of the results is of course to see how different a male and female’s brand usages are, but I think there are going to be a few interesting insights as well. I definitely found out more about my needs, wants, usage patterns and brand loyalty by doing this.
Our criteria is simple: If we are likely to use a particular brand on an average day, we’ll include it in. So for example, even though I may only use my Flip Mino once or twice a week, I include it because the probability I use it on an average day is about even.
While originally, this was organised by timeline (i.e. at what time would you interact with which brand), I’ve decided to do it by category because I think it says more about my consumption patterns that way. Does it mean I use all of these brands everyday? No. But it’s fairly representative in that if I feel like a coffee, Tim Hortons is my destination.
Social Media/Web Apps
Social Media/Web Apps
So I’ll start, obviously, with social media and web apps. This is fairly straightforward, but the one thing I noticed when I started to list down the brands I’d include, was that Windows Media Player was an app I particularly wanted to list due to my immense dislike of iTunes.
Technology/Gadgets
Technology & Gadgets
Pretty straightforward here, so I’ll leave it as that.
Apparel
Apparel
This was just about the hardest category to do. For each of the brands listed up there, I have only one or two products from them: Zara (jacket, coat), Nike (sneakers), American Eagle (wallet), H&M (jacket, scarf), Guess (jeans), Levis (boxers, jeans).
This by no means indicates clothes aren’t important to me, just that I’d rather find some obscure shop and find a “slogan” tee, rather than head to the Gap or wherever to purchase one. However, the brands I do purchase for clothes (particularly Zara, Guess and Nike), I’m particularly loyal to.
Hygiene
Hygiene
Hygiene was fun to do because I have so many products. The ones I’m listing here are only those I’m using here with me in Canada, and I’m sure I have plenty more back home. I’m going to say hygiene is one area where I’m most susceptible to advertising.
Oral B from the whole “more dentists use” ads, Colgate was on all the time growing up, Axe from all the cool male advertising, Gillette is everywhere as well. I also want to say I actually have a strong dislike for Adidas as a brand, but only use their deodorant because it complements the cologne.
Interests
Interests
This was another really hard category because you don’t have brands for “books” or “music” or “Heroes” or “Lost”. So I included the brands of graphic novels I’m likely to read, as well as MTV (the TV channel I’m most likely to watch) and EA Sports which is the brand of the game (FIFA ‘09) that I’m playing now
Food
Food And Drink
This was not surprising at all. I generally don’t care about the food I eat, but I do like my drinks. The interesting thing here is that none of these brands would exist if I was blogging about this from Singapore. Tim Hortons would be Starbucks, Molson Canadian beer would be Corona, and Vitamin Water doesn’t exist. In other words, my brand preference is rather flexible and easily changed. Prior to coming here I hadn’t tried either Tim Hortons or Molson Canadian, but they’ve displaced my usual brands pretty quickly.
Finally, one miscellaneous brand:
Equality Logo
This is Equality, which is, from what I can tell, the house brand of Canada. Easily 20-40% of the stuff we buy here for the house, is from the Equality brand. Microwave food, toilet paper, eggs, canned food and much much more is all Equality.
I guess this is meaningful because when we first came here and went to the supermarket, we didn’t know what brands to get, but the mere pervasiveness of Equality made us gravitate towards it. Also, even though Equality easily accounts for a large portion of our weekly expenditure, I couldn’t find its’ logo online, and had to take a picture to get it. An overlooked brand, perhaps?
My takeaways from this exercise?
1) I experiment with a lot of brands. Nikon, HTC, Molson Canadian and Vitamin Water didn’t exist in my mind one year ago, but they do now.
2) I consider myself part of the “tribe” of some brands than others. Skullcandy, Nike, Flip, Sony, Axe, and MTV just to name a few.
3) Old habits die hard. I don’t think I’ve ever used another toothbrush except Oral B, or toothpaste except Colgate. Even if I did see products from other brands on the shelves, they don’t even register. It’s also very hard for me to use other social bookmarking tools like Twine because I’m so used to Delicious.
4) Word of mouth influences my purchase decisions a lot. Skullcandy, Sony, Nikon, Axe, Firefox, HTC, Flip, Versace and Tim Hortons are all word of mouth brands, that are now favourite brands.
How about you? What are the brands you feel passionately about? How do they fit into your daily/weekly/monthly behavior? If you were to do one of these by category or by timeline, how would it look?
ps: I’m sure I left out some brands of stuff that I use but just didn’t take note off, please excuse that.
Tags: adidas, american eagle, axe, blankanvas, brand timeline portrait, brands guys use, canon, colgate, dc, delicious, dopod, ea sports, equality, facebook, firefox, flip mino, gillette, guess, h&m, head & shoulders, htc, ipod touch, last.fm, levi's, marvel, molson canadian, mtv, nike, nikon, oral b, pat law, Plurk, popular brands, seaget, skullcandy, sony vaio, steam, tim hortons, twitter, versace blue jeans, vitamin water, windows media player, wordpress, zara, zirh
Posted in Gen Y, case studies, collaboration | 7 Comments »
Sunday, June 29th, 2008
Remember my earlier post where OMD treated about 140 students like idiots and thought we didn’t know they were farming for ideas under false pretenses? Well here’s the flip side.
MTV came in after lunch with their execs in regular MTV attire, and gave us a straightforward, no bull$#!t account of what life is in MTV. Talking around with my friends afterwards, the general sentiment that they were the most “genuine” of the three companies that we interacted with that way. No “rehearsed” lines provided by PR or HR, no “dumbing down” because we’re students and they’re execs, and I think that made the difference.
I think the proof showed when many students went up to find out more from the MTV execs after the panel discussion.
I think anyone who was at the earlier panels would know that the crowd largely dissipated once they ended, but people actually had to be ushered out of the room this time. Maybe the “clout” of the MTV brand name is stronger? I don’t know.
Lesson learnt? We may be young, but we know when we’re being treated as proper talent that your company may want to hire, and will respond in kind. Maybe companies want to think “Ahh, undergrads are a dime a dozen, they’ll flock to us anyway. Just show them all the awards we’ve won and credentials we have”. Perhaps that’s true for the masses, but the sensing I get is we want to work with companies we identify with, who recognise that we aren’t a dime a dozen, and we’ll seek out the best companies which treat us as such, and not like we’re a dime a dozen.
(Full disclosure: I served my internship with MTV last week and will be re-joining them on Tuesday on a freelance project. If anything this proves my point because if they truly were faking their panel discussion, why would I go back?)
Tags: Gen Y, idea farming, mtv, mtv asia, mtvasia, omd, omniture, treating students like idiots
Posted in Gen Y | No Comments »
Wednesday, June 25th, 2008
More on the IDC Web2.0 Conference yesterday (attendees aside), there were some great insights that I’d love to talk about.
Prof. Michael brought up a point that I personally identify with. He says sometimes he has a guest in the class room and the guest is talking to the class, but the class is talking to each other via IM (or maybe Twitter), in other words, we’re having multiple levels of conversation.
I hope this is not new to marketers by now. Listen to Sarah from ReadWriteWeb or Ian from MTV. Generation Y is doing this. All the time.
Sarah will tell you they won’t even read this far down a blog post. Ian will tell you we have the computer on talking to 7 friends with MTV in the background and alternate-tabbing between games while stopping once in awhile to sms someone.
And that’s the truth.
Marketers are not going to get our full attention. And they certainly can’t demand it. They’re going to have to fight for it, not by interruption, but with darn compelling content. Does this mean we absorb less if we’re doing five things at the same time? Without empirical proof I’m going to say maybe. But I feel it also makes us aware of more. I can’t walk out of a movie these days without picking up at least one or two brands featured in the show, and more often than not the conversation becomes a “hey did you see that BMW insert?” after the movie.
Speaking as a Gen Y consumer myself, I love it when brands make the effort to connect, and seem like they’re genuine. (not some scammy thing). I’ll talk to you about Sony, about EA Games, about Bluehost and about HP because I know that they’re at least recognising the new presence of the new consumers and trying. They may not be fantastic at it, but it’s better than pretending we don’t exist or are a “fad”. (full disclosure: my office does PR work for HP)
Speaking of listening, I wanted to talk about this yesterday and am further prompted by this comment. Dear Yahoo!, I love that you sponsor stuff like the Web2.0 conference, but Jonathan is right. Does it make sense to sponsor it when people don’t get what you’re about? I love the “social” ymail and I love how it was presented in a non-intrusive way together with the goodie bags. But wouldn’t it be cooler to connect with say, 60 people who are in the space, in the know and can really appreciate what your product is about? Or give them a chance to try it and be bought over?
If you’re willing to listen to a proposition (not for me, but for the local Singaporean blogosphere), let’s start a conversation!
Tags: bluehost, ea games, Gen Y, generation y, hp, ianstewartmtv, IDC web2.0 conference, im, mtv, multi-tasking, multiple levels of conversation, readwriteweb, sarahintampa, social media insights, sony, sponsorship, twitter, yahoo, ymail
Posted in Blogs, Marketing, collaboration, community, social media | 4 Comments »
Tuesday, May 13th, 2008
Remember why students should blog? Well I’m happy to announce that the third internship worked out and I start on Wednesday. Exact details won’t be posted because of confidentiality issues, but suffice to say it’s social media related.
To me the biggest value is to be thrown into the “real world” and see if the stuff I’ve been blogging about makes sense, or am I living in this dream from the outside looking in. Could be a harsh slap of reality, but better now than later.
The downside is that it’s only six weeks (because I’ve committed the whole of July and half of August to my previous employer, MTV to work on the MTV Asia Awards held in Malaysia. That is going to be a blast!
However, rest assured the blogging here will not be changed in anyway. I definitely won’t be blogging about work unless given express permission, and if I do, it will be fully disclosed. I might end up blogging less than normal because of work hours, but that’s what RSS is for! (Don’t know how to subscribe, here’s my handy guide).
Finally, I want to thank everyone who’s been reading, commenting or interacting with this blog in any way. This could be the best blog in the world (it’s not), but if no one was reading it, it would be useful. So thanks for supporting me by reading, talking to someone else about me, attending Social Media Breakfast: Singapore. It’s because of you that I landed this internship. So let me end this post with: thank you for reading
Tags: benefits of blogging, mtv, mtv asia, mtv asia awards, mtv genting, mtv malaysia, smb singapore, social media breakfast singapore, student blogs, why students should blog
Posted in Blogs, social media, social media breakfast | 15 Comments »
