Twitter attends the Royal Wedding

Please note this is a re-post from an article I wrote on 06/05/2011 on http://www.brandseye.com but the website has since changed format and my posts are no longer accessible there.

With the Royal Wedding having been a major focus for the world this past weekend, BrandsEye took a look at just how much of an impact this conversation had on the online community at large.

In a single day, this fun and fanciful occasion captivated the star struck hearts of more than 20% of the global population, reportedly having attracted a total viewership of over two billion people. This contrasted with an estimated 750 million viewers of the wedding of Prince Charles and Diana Spencer in 1981.

Yes, the global population may have increased relatively equally since then but never before have so many people – ordinary grassroots consumers like you and me – had the opportunity to engage with the official proceedings via the platform of social media.

In a sense, these networks have since allowed consumers to take ownership of their own experience of the royal wedding – where their ownership implies, their being able to share their 5 cents worth with their respective online audiences.

In this way, hundreds of millions of people across the globe were actively engaging online, generating conversation of their views and opinions about everything from fashions on the day to the controversy of the guests both in attendance and in absentia.

Where did the most adoring fans come from?

Considering population levels, the most talkative nation was not the house-proud Britons who accounted for a 17% share of conversation but rather the Americans who topped the charts with a 29% share.

Otherwise, the people most involved in this conversation came predominantly from former British colonies namely, South Africa, Canada, India and Australia – collectively generating 28% of the royal wedding buzz.  Interestingly enough, statistically significant conversation also came from Indonesia, Italy and France – accounting for a 4% and 2% respective share of the total conversation. Similarly, 89% of this conversation was in English with some conversation also picked up in French and Italian.

Of course, there was also the Royal Wedding drinking game, which started under a similar premise to the one based on the South African State of the Nation Address, where participants would take penalty drinks based on appearances by specific celebrities and members of the royal family, references to Charles and Diana’s wedding etc.

The Facebook page – The Royal Wedding Drinking Game 29/04/11, which inspired most of the awareness of the game received 335 978 likes and 249 mentions of uniquely South African engagement.

As proven during the South African State of the Nation Address, the drinking game version proved a great vehicle for everyday people to engage with and celebrate the occasion not only in the comfort of their homes or local pubs but in their own online communities as well.

Before, aside from those present at the ceremony, the broadcasting of this message in the case of Charles and Diana’s wedding in the 1980s, was one-way in nature and was limited to television and radio, allowing for no feedback or engagement from their 750 million-strong audience.

As a result, traditional communication mediums were deaf to the vast quantities of hundreds of millions of branded back-channel conversations occurring off the back of broadcasts like these in living rooms and bars around the world.

As such, the marketing community at large was missing out on vast quantities of branded conversation and ultimately valuable opportunities for market research.

Having celebrities like Victoria and David Beckham present at a ceremony like this or having a couture wedding dress would merely have accounted for isolated response conversation between fans offline.

Social media have allowed these conversations extend beyond lounges and bars, allowing participants to share their experiences with people across the world – which was never possible to this extent in the 1980s.

“We have a Dream…” for Political Freedom Online

Please note this is a re-post from an article I wrote on 11/04/2011 on http://www.brandseye.com but the website has since changed format and my posts are no longer accessible there.

On the subject of consumers’ rights online, I started to question how much political freedom do we as consumers actually have online? While social networks have brought about the en masse access of the internet by consumers in their personal capacity, have they really afforded the man on the street any more freedom?

The intention of this post is to provide a rather malleable summary of exactly what freedoms we do and don’t have when using the internet and social media. As such, improvement and/or feedback thereof are most welcomed.

Firstly, the right to freely express/practice one’s political alignment online is a fundamental tenet of an internet consumer’s rights.  In this sense, as one’s social identity defines one’s political stance and values – expressing a social viewpoint also implies the tacit expression of one’s political leanings.

So, within reason, consumers should be entitled to freely express themselves online in the manner and via the medium we choose.

This conversely extends to the right of not being prohibited from expressing/practicing one’s political expressions as well. By whatever force or censorship, preventing someone from expressing their views, again, within reason – is tantamount to the obstruction of this freedom.

Internet censorship is more endemic that you may think. The following infographic from Reporters Sans Frontières details the extent of online freedoms as created and/or hindered by each country’s respective authorities.

Interestingly enough, even the supposedly ‘free’ Western world experiences ‘some censorship’ of information sharing and transfer. While, despite their affiliation to more single party governance and unitary political sentiment, internet censorship tends to be less present within developing states in the Americas and in Africa.

Taken further, this leads to consumers’ rights to privacy from others and the right to owning one’s own thoughts and idea’s…

There is a perception that social media represent the means to share whatever content the user desires without consequence – though not all of this information is of a non-sensitive nature and internet users are accountable to their greater community, in protecting them from non-sensitive content.

Simply said, if you share matters of a personal nature, you must accept that your community may respond with rebuke and similarly act upon your content by sharing or manipulating it. It is for reasons such as these, that we forgo the right of total freedom of speech.

That which we do not protect within the closed domain is liable to be viewed and used by other parties.

By publishing content in the open domain, in terms of intellectual property rights, it would belong to the author unless otherwise stipulated – though who said anything of the seeding/gathering thereof?

Information is intangible and akin to David Thorne’s notorious Spider Email, it cannot be lessened or taken away from. If you tweet something and it is retweeted twenty times, the point is still yours – though many more would have had the opportunity to share in its value.

What then of the gathering of content online – for the purposes of deriving insight? It must be said that that information was publicly shared, anyone should then similarly be afforded the right to derive insight and value from it. Once again, this is within reason.

It is one thing to provide value to consumers and the brands they choose, helping the latter community to better understand the needs of the former but another entirely to maliciously manipulate this data or restrict one’s access to content creation/sharing for the purposes of vilifying someone for practicing one or other political belief.

In the case of internet censorship and surveillance, this may very likely be a direct infringement of political rights online.

For the purposes of this article, there is one last vehicle which may impede one’s political freedoms online, though this time not by government or other user.

On another level, if the internet is such a powerful and valuable learning tool offering the wealth of the collective wisdom of billions, should access to the internet be regarded as a protected civil liberty or an inalienable human right even?

Considering that the internet, among so many other applications, is allowing people to educate themselves, which is helping to close the digital divide as well as to pursue happiness or narcissistic fulfilment (satisfying Maslow’s needs for self actualisation and of esteem/recognition by others respectively). In the context of a human being’s needs, should access to the internet be free?

Similarly, should data transfer be free? In the same breath, does private ownership of accessing that information (by service providers) preclude poorer consumers from benefitting from learning, knowledge transfer and the right to content creation?

Knowledge belongs to everyone – information is freely available – or is it? While data access is gradually becoming more affordable (depending where you live in the world) – surfing the internet is still an expensive pursuit.

The manipulation of data online – whether the downloading/uploading of content is without a doubt very expensive – one may not need to have a computer with even the more basic of mobile phones now enabled for internet access, but one does need to purchase data and depending where one is, that may be very expensive. Not to mention that usable, valid internet access assumes one is also literate and has some basic understanding of the online space.

However, with rights, come certain power as well, which in the face of possible monopolisation of the online space by governmental and commercial interests will be the saving grace of the consumer.

We have seen in recent times that even despite limited online freedoms whether political or other, that social media have proven to be powerful enough to incite revolution and social change. 

By the sheer size of the global market, consumers’ strength in numbers will allow them to retain a degree of influence and/or control over those actors, political, commercial or otherwise that may seek to limit that power. Ultimately, it is by retaining this unanimity, whether through social media, social gaming applications, or platforms which allow for social democracy, that consumers shall foster their political freedom online.

Crowdsourcing: Interview with Daniel Neville from Idea Bounty

Please note this is a re-post from an article I wrote on 12/03/2012 on http://www.brandseye.com but the website has since changed format and my posts are no longer accessible there.

BrandsEye has just established a crowdsourcing platform called BrandsEye Crowd. However, because we’re new at this business, we thought we’d speak to someone with more experience and of course share our findings with you too. Please welcome, Daniel Neville of Idea Bounty.

What is Idea Bounty?

Idea Bounty is an innovative ideas-generation platform for the marketing communication industry. We focus on coming up with fresh and innovatinve marketing and communications ideas and concepts for our clients. A big thing to note is that our briefs only look for ideas not finished products like Jovoto does for example.

What need does the business solve?

It’s becoming increasingly difficult for brands to come up with new fresh and original ideas from traditional sources, especially since the speed at which these ideas need to be sourced is increasing exponentially. Those that still use traditional methods of sourcing ideas, find they’re very costly and often a little slow.  Idea Bounty offers a new and innovative way of sourcing fresher ideas thought still leaving the client with control of the final product.

Where can crowdsourcing be applied in business?

Everywhere! Idea-generation and marketing, problem-solving, R&D, product dev, simple suggestion boxes, micro-tasking and crowdfunding for projects like Kickstarter does. It’s popping up more and more in business in interesting ways.

Who are the big names in the industry?

There’s Crowdspring, Springleap and 99 Designs (who all do variations of graphic design). Threadless – was the first business to make money of crowdsourcing in 1999. There’s also the Mechanical Turk – a micro tasking platform run by Amazon. And then of course, Jeff Howe, who coined the term ‘crowdsourcing’ in 2006.

How would you describe the greater crowdsourcing industry?

By nature it’s very transparent, and practitioners tend to group together, via platforms like the The Daily Crowdsource,Crowdsourcing.org (where members only include practitioners). It’s encouraging to see that even competing platforms are intent on creating a sustainable industry so they’re communicating intensely.

So who owns the ideas/the solutions?

It differs between platforms. At Idea Bounty, the creatives own the idea until it’s bought by the client for a bounty. Idea ownership then transfers from the creative to the client.

What happens if they don’t win? How do they benefit from the process?

Interestingly enough money is only #3 on people’s incentives to participate. For the most part our members are looking for exciting new challenges to take part in and everyone wants to, or thinks they can come up with a better ad than the next guy. Idea Bounty also has a significant number of community members (just over 455) who work professionally in the marketing communications industry which gives them the opportunities to work on brands other than their current clients.

Students are also a big part of the community, often using Idea Bounty as a way to gain experince and build up a portfolio. Then you have your stay-at-home moms who just want something fun to do. The average time spent on an idea is only 30minutes, so the risk vs. reward is very low.

Crowdsourcing = Lots of people, working on ideas, separately? Wouldn’t the problem solving process be better if they could feed off each other’s ideas and produce one big one?

On average, crowds can be very ‘dumb’ when attempting to make collective decisions. As a group they’ll offten tend to settle for the lowest common denominator. That’s why voting systems often cause issues – in general an average idea will win as the truly fresh ones have a harder time being noticed. Individuals have ideas, not crowds. Crowdsourcing broadens the scope for ideas.

Finally, what’s the coolest crowdsourcing application/project that you’ve come across?

The Pepsi Refresh Project and Iceland’s Crowdsourced constitution. Also, India’s used it to clamp down on traffic violations, where citizens take and upload photos of offenders which the authorities follow up on. Similarly, a small municipality initiative in the UK, helps fix potholes and broken streetlights. It’s easier to bring about service delivery using a crowdsourced process, because authorities don’t have to find anomalies themselves.