Blog

You remember the first time you swapped your old Nokia for a smartphone, well… this is nothing like that. This is, if you will excuse the obvious analogy, more like switching from iOS to Android. Which is better? It’s possible that WWIII is going to be started by someone saying “iPhone sucks” and cities will crumble to the chant of “Android rulez” so I might skip over that.

You would have to think after Buzz and Wave bombed this is probably Google’s last try at entering the social space, it’s getting a little embarrassing it feels a little like watching a friend strike out with every girl at a party. But you know what they say… the third/fourth/fifth time’s a charm! And from what I’ve seen this time they may just have done it right…

Ask yourself a question… when was the last time that Facebook had a major update that felt like you, the user, were the driving force. It’s been a long time. This is a fact that has, obviously, been keenly observed by Google: “We’d like to bring the nuance and richness of real-life sharing to software. We want to make Google better by including you, your relationships, and your interests”

So, onward to the features:

The main feature of Google+ is Circles. Based around the idea that people do not want to share everything with everyone and the word ‘friend’ does not mean one thing, it encompasses lifelong friends, university friends and people you barely know so why would you treat them all in the same way.

What is really refreshing about Circles is that you don’t have to be a Google+ member to take part, if someone adds you to a circle you can still interact via e-mail. There’s not a ‘Like’-gate on everything.

With Sparks, Google delivers a feed of content to you based on your interests. Allowing you to read/watch blogs, sites and videos from across the internet and share it with your circles.

I’m unsure how useful the Hangout feature is but it’s certainly very cool and at least based on a real life concept of meeting up with a group of friends unplanned and simply hanging out. “By combining the casual meetup with live multi-person video, Hangouts lets you stop by when you’re free, and spend time with your Circles. Face-to-face-to-face”

With Google+, mobile hasn’t come as an afterthought, it’s built into the core aspects of the project with features specifically designed for mobile;
Location: With Google+ you can add your location to every post, but only if you want to.
Instant upload: While taking photos on your phone they will automatically be stored in the cloud, so they are always available and ready to share. Again this will only be done with your permission.
Huddle: Huddle is a group messaging service connecting you to your entire circle immediately.

And here’s some initial thoughts from our team:

“This is a pretty exciting development but will surly move towards its full capacity when the Android OS is full optimised to support it. The massive growth in Android phones will give Google a fantastic platform to promote this ‘social network’ as well as the huge audience who already live online through the multitude of Google products.” – Welton

“In all, I think the more Google services one uses the better this will work. Your searches, bookmarks, contacts and people you regularly email/text/chat will more than likely play a huge role.” – Adam

“Initial reports are really interesting and it sounds like Google have put an immense amount of effort into a wide range of areas.

I’m excited by the prospect of it being far easier or quicker to share particular things with different sets of people as opposed to discovering something and then having to log in to Facebook, find a friend and post to their wall or inbox. It sounds like it might be easier to interact with different types of contacts rather than having to get bogged down in Facebook’s limited profile and privacy settings to maintain your social boundaries online.” – Tony

So your next question is… where do I sign up? right? Well slight problem like all of Google’s ventures you’ll need to sign up and wait for an invite, in the mean time you should hit up any friends who have any connection to Google whatsoever to try to get an advanced invite (oh and send one my way while you’re at it!).

Greenpeace vs Mattel via Tom

The biggest news of the week is that Ken finally dumped Barbie and he’s really letting her know it with a nationwide poster campaign and a viral video.

Greenpeace find a fun way to bring their campaign against Mattel to life.

Perrier’s Steamy Party via Rob

Perrier have created an interactive YouTube experience that, as they put it, gets sexier, steamier and wilder as the number of views goes up. We’re currently half way up the temperature gauge so there’s certainly room for the party to get hotter.

Evan Roth for Mozilla’s Mark Up Project via Stu

“An open Net embraces free culture. That doesn’t mean disrespecting the copyright of others. It means instead enabling others to share and build upon the work you want the Net to love. Practice the freedom you expect from others, by licensing your work as freely as you can.” – Lawrence Lessig for Mark Up

Intel’s Museum of Me via Gem

Great use of Facebook Connect to create a museum all about your Facebook life. Narcissistic? A little. Cool? Very.

Recently, in a marketing meeting, we discussed, debated and argued the pros and cons of location based services. Are they the next big thing as some seem to be hailing them, or are they a premature technology hyped out of the game before their time?

Four members of the marketing team, representing very different views, gave us their thoughts:

Ronnie

Location-based services have been bubbling along for a while now but haven’t managed to really ingrain themselves into the masses. There are a number of reasons for this (scalability, relevancy, privacy etc.). However, my feeling is that they simply haven’t found their true purpose yet, and maybe won’t for some time. I’ll try to explain.

At the moment we’re trying to apply old marketing techniques to new technology. The idea that people are constantly searching for deals on their phone or are happy to be interrupted with offers is flawed and out-dated. It’s the same model used to describe what would happen when Bluetooth technology first hit. We’re now even less tolerant of overt marketing than we were then.

Where location works right now is when it’s useful. For instance Disneyland Paris have a great app that lets you plan your visit, marks you on the map, informs you of the waiting time for each of the rides and even throws in a bit of AR for good measure. The only interruption is a handy reminder of the things you have booked 10 minutes before they start.

I think the future of these types of services will rely on them being applied to new technology or behaviours yet to be assimilated into society, rather than trying to apply them to existing marketing practice.

Marigold

I have almost 5,000 ‘friends’ on Facebook, yet barely ever see anyone check in anywhere. On the rare occasions a check-in appears it’s often met with mocking “who cares?!” comments underneath it.

People say of location, “why would I want to tell people where I am?”, in the same way they used to say “why would I want to tell people what I had for lunch?” about Twitter. Except this time they’re right. Check-ins tend to be quite bald. Sure, one can append additional information to them but this rarely happens and so the update simply reports the user’s location. Actually pretty boring.

More critical to location’s success or failure is the privacy issue. One of the main aversions to video calling is the technologically small but psychologically giant step it introduces, moving the user from the abstract to the real. The fact is, people like having a degree of anonymity while they communicate. Email, SMS, IM all allow you to deal with responses in your own time in the context of your choosing. Even speaking on the phone allows you to do other things while you talk without offending the other party.

Unless enough people overcome their aversion to giving away that degree of privacy location is unlikely to attain the traction it needs for mass appeal.

There’s also likely to be a headline at some point involving location. Probably a young person abducted or killed with their attacker’s action being enabled by the location info the victim was giving away. Once that happens parents and schools will kill location as quickly as they can. Not unreasonably.

Tony

I check-in regularly via Foursquare which updates my Twitter feed. I find it a quick and useful way to share somewhere interesting I’ve attended with my real life friends that I chat with via tweets. I favour Foursquare’s automatic updates to Twitter rather than Facebook Places’ updates to my wall because I like the light entertainment of badges and points. I also find my iPhone’s Facebook app a little unwelcoming and occasionally enjoy browsing Foursquare’s user generated tips.

Social media activity’s often about showing off; you won’t see me shouting about being at the local takeaway in the early hours or sitting on a park bench, but you will find me putting my virtual flag in the digital ground of interesting gigs, museums and great restaurants or bars. People using location treat it as another outlet to present themselves in a way they’d like to be seen. I want people to see that I went to a Rakim show this month so they associate me a little more with decent, historic rap music and knowledge. So I checked in at the gig. I don’t want people to know I munched through an all you can eat buffet at Pizza Hut because I’m a bit ashamed and would rather people not know that I’m unhealthy and live off grease from time to time. So the phone stayed in my pocket.

In terms of what location can offers brands, I think this will increase with time and new developments in tools and functionality. At the moment, location’s a fairly separate aspect to social media activity, homed in its entirety on a lone platform (Foursquare) or hidden in iPhone app tabs and busy news feeds (Facebook Places). If Facebook were to put a leader board at the top of every user’s profile page showing the places they’ve visited the most or most recently, there would suddenly be a permanent, prominent place for a brand’s name to be championed to a user’s private network. I think that’s when critical mass will pick up location more and people’s inclination to check-in at locations will increase. Then brands can start promoting themselves to more people at a louder volume.


Welton

I’m certainly seeing some drip-through from my colleagues and techie friends (as you’d expect) using location based applications, to my school friends who don’t work in the industry.

For them it seems to be a rather practical device, allowing them to let key friends know where they are at any time (usually the pub).

The thing that is holding massive growth is confusion in my eyes. One friend frequents a certain pub, on an almost daily basis (yes we have talked to him about it). Nowadays he happily checks-in on Facebook to let his friends know he is holding fort as per usual. He became increasingly frustrated, however, that he hadn’t “become mayor yet” and looked dejected when I told him he needed to download Foursquare.

It is great to have competition with very different service offerings in the LBS arena but I feel it’s one of the main things holding it back. It seems all too easy to talk about it from a marketing point of view, but we really need to consider the regular, less digitally-savvy users.

Ultimately Location Based Services appear to be on a knife’s edge, it could go either way. All four of our team believe that there is scope for them to continue but to what degree and will it be in the same form? The answer to the former is probably little and the answer to the latter is almost certainly no… but until then there is still some fun to be had with these services both on a personal level and for brands.