Denuology: The Observation and Observations of Denuo. » Media

MLB Hits a Home Run with Twitter (Get it!?!?!)

jdurbin — Mon, 11 Jul 2011 20:18:36 +0000

Twitter and pro sports have had a tumultuous love affair. On one hand, leagues have benefitted from players and fans connecting directly. On the other hand, Larry Johnson.

At one point in 2009, it looked like Twitter and professional sports would never get along. Teams and media properties were heavily regulating content of tweets or banning it altogether.

Thankfully, we’re to a point now where enough people in decision-making positions understand how Twitter works. Teams are able to give players social media training. They have gone from blanket banning to friendly warning if a player gets a little liberal with their tweets. The change has been great for fans as we can get news and insider views like no other generation of sports fan before us.

Tonight will hopefully be the next step in the evolution of how we view sports.

Major League Baseball has empowered players at tonight’s Home Run Derby to tweet their brains out during the event (but just this event). They will aggregate the content on MLB.com as well as other social channels or you can follow your favorite player who will be tweeting.

While the idea of players tweeting could never work during games (due to media commitments and you shouldn’t tweet during your homerun trot, amongst other things), it raises a question: Why not have someone doing this for every team for every game?

Players can’t do it, but a team employee can. Someone integrated with the team, on the bench, in the dugout, on the sideline with enough savvy to know what to tweet and what not to tweet that he/she overhears or sees. And honestly, if a player is injured or not playing that night, what reason is there not to let them tweet?

Twitter offers an opportunity that television and radio can’t replicate by allowing a series of Twitter handles that can each have a unique voice. A TV broadcast has to appeal to as many people as possible. Therefore, oftentimes you won’t get real in-depth analysis and only hear what teams are willing to tell a sideline reporter.

With Twitter, a team could create accounts that provide that instant analysis that TV executives think would alienate the casual fan (side note: I disagree with this philosophy. Your audience will be as smart as you empower them to be). They could explain why a pitcher is laying off his cutter that particular day. Or why the two tight end set is killing a defense. Or why a team that tends to rely on the three pointer is suddenly driving to the hoop.

It seems like a natural progression of where analysis and sports coverage is heading. Sportswriters and fans are starting to provide analysis during games. Better for teams to get in front of the trend and potentially create a property they can monetize along with their broadcast streams.

Watching the games is why we follow the athletes or executives. It’s like the opening credits to a movie. Following them tells us who or what we expect to see. But without the film (or game), then we just looked at a bunch of words. Yet the crux of their business, the games, is the one place that is going untouched. Here’s hoping that soon after tonight’s Tater Contest, that stops being the case.

WHY CROWDSOURCING IS NOT JUST FOR ADVERTISING

cblumberg — Tue, 05 Jul 2011 18:37:37 +0000

Is it possible that crowdsourcing has become even trendier since we last spoke? In just the past six weeks, we’ve seen everyone from bands, non-profit organizations, premium liquors, and auto manufacturers turn to the crowds for assistance. I’m scared to blink, for fear of missing the newest collaboration between a brand and their consumers. But for all of the hype, there is a level of redundancy to nearly every project announced. Despite the subtle twists, there is a common thread: a distinct focus on advertising.

Though a bit dated, my favorite example of collaboration has always been The GoldCorp Challenge. Frustrated with in-house analysis, GoldCorp published all of their geological data on the web, offering a total of $575M in prize money to participants who submitted the best methods and estimates for finding previously untapped gold deposits. GoldCorp received over 1200 submissions from individuals in 50 different countries. 110 new sites were identified, with 80% producing gold. 8 million ounces of gold was found, driving the company’s value from $100 million to $9 billion. All of this occurred despite the fact that many employees were pushing to abandon mining that particular location all together.

The GoldCorp challenge is a great example of leveraging the wisdom of the crowds to solve for a specific business problem. By publishing their data online, the mining corporation was able to get a fresh perspective from a wide variety of viewpoints. Traditional means couldn’t solve the problem at hand, and what the masses were able to bring to the table was an attack from a new viewpoint, using different technologies that GoldCorp employees would have never thought to use. Netflix is another great example of a brand leveraging global talent to solve an internal problem. It wasn’t a Netflix coder that came up with their proprietary movie recommendation algorithm, which generates an average of 30 billion predictions per day. It was a group of engineers that had never met in person sending emails back and forth.

As the above shows, it’s possible that the best solution to a difficult organizational problem may not come from someone inside the building. Yet another way to leverage the masses is not by having them focus on a single problem, but instead letting them point out what needs are going unmet. This can take multiple-forms, such as a new product, process, way of interacting with consumers, or a new business model all together. Take Starbucks for example. The coffee manufacturer built a social platform for consumers to interact with the brand, a place where registered users can suggest ideas relating to product offerings, in-store experiences, and community outreach. Since launch, it’s been consumers that have provided the inspiration behind the coffee giant. And the results? Head into any Starbucks and you’ll see Starbucks Petites and the Mocha Coconut Frappuccino on the menu. Both those ideas came from requests on My Starbucks Idea.

Collaboration with consumers provides a powerful tool for organizations, but as of today many are not maximizing their fan’s potential. Not to say that, when done correctly, a campaign focused on advertising can’t be an effective tool. But as Netflix and Starbucks have shown, the crowds can also solve for real problems that have a direct affect on bottom line. Additionally, these type of campaigns offer access to the top individuals, technologies, and expertise from across the globe. GoldCorp received submissions from over 50 countries; Netflix had registrants from over 150. These are somewhat dated examples, but they remain the gold standard and there is no reason we can’t continue down this path and start solving for problems that actually impact bottom line results. You never know where that next great idea may come from, but when you’re leveraging the talents of a global R&D department, chances are you won’t have to look far to find it.

REFLECTEUR – Issue 81

Lizzy Bogacki — Thu, 07 Apr 2011 15:50:18 +0000

There’s a lot of data out there about us. In fact, it’s easy to forget just how much information various companies and organizations (and the Internet in general) know about us. The first page of Reflecteur this week looks at the ways two separate sites used infographics to display a huge amount of information with very different results:

* Where Americans are Moving looks at 2008 IRS data to map county to county moves. It’s your one stop shop to US migratory information and it only takes a few minutes of playing with the maps to realize that there are a lot of stories hidden within this data. Just click on ‘Detroit’.
* Watch a Phone Company Stalk a Customer is, not surprisingly based on the title, far more disturbing. This site maps, via a video, all of the data a phone company in Germany gathered on one of their customers over 6 months. It seems more spy movie thriller than real life.

Travel over to Page 2 for a bit more fun:

* Classic Arcade Game Deaths is just that, a video of the death/Game Over scene from numerous classic games. We love that it ties into the nostalgia so promenent within digital culture but remains original. A large reason it stands apart from the countless other 90s video game tributes is the fact that it focuses on an often ignored (but important) part of these games while also playing with its context. Together these attributes help make this such an amusing and captivating view.
* The Reflecteur April Fools Overview discusses our opinion on why this holiday has taken off within digital culture. (Hint: because it shares so much in common with digital culture.) We also include links to some of our favorite website and brand April Fools Day efforts.

As always, Reflecteur is part of VivaKi’s intellectual capital and can be shared with outside parties including clients and partners. Reach out to Ellen Bird, ellen.bird@vivaki.com, or your assigned agency lead for more information about the publication or the other Reflecteur assets.

Download Issue 81 of Reflecteur here.

REFLECTEUR – Issue 80

Lizzy Bogacki — Wed, 23 Mar 2011 19:10:41 +0000

Page one features 2 reinventions:

* In an interesting twist to the reimagining world theme we often discuss, Picture Cook takes the stuffy old recipe format and redesigns it with a focus on experimentation. Even if you’re more into the cut-and-dry recipe format, these flowchart-like versions of recipes will look great on your kitchen wall.

* Travel Time Tube reworks the classic London Tube map. A fixture in the design world, this site completely changes the focus of the map from relation to time. Put in two stations and watch it change forms based on routes that take the longest.

Page two looks at two captivating photo collections:

* Ghana- The Electronic Dumping Ground of the World highlights the dark side of technology and electronics. Perhaps the ‘new gadget smell’ isn’t everything it’s cracked up to be?

* Finally, we get a glimpse of a somewhat odd underworld in Taryn Smith’s Contraband. These images showcase 1,000 various items confiscated at JFK airport in New York. Some items make sense, but some…. well you just need to see them to believe it.

Download issue 80 of Reflecteur here!

Marketing Lesson from GDC11: PLAY!

btorres — Thu, 17 Mar 2011 22:20:30 +0000

Greetings, fellow marketers. It’s me. Benny. I come bearing a simple request from the Game Developers Conference. Play deliberately. In your daily life, realize when you are playing something. Then, pay attention to why and how you’re playing what you’re playing.

It can be anything. Texas Hold ‘em with your buddies. Monopoly with the family. Angry Birds on your phone. Call of Duty: Black Ops against your brother from Toadsuck, AR. Just play and pay attention to why and how you are playing. It’s really that simple. The why and how of this simple request are just a click away. If you’d love to read, mosey on down.

It seems that we as marketers have finally started to pay attention to games as something other than a place for digital out-of-home. There seems to have been a collective realization that our consumers are playing more and more games for longer and longer time periods. A realization that when people are playing games, they’re utterly engaged. Unable or unwilling to divide attention for those (oh so prevalent) marketing messages.

And so – obviously – we want a piece of that action. The result of this newfound attention has been something called “gamification.” It’s a very new, very amorphous term. But, for most marketers, it seems to represent a way to easily bring the mojo that makes games to engaging to our marketing programs.

And that’s awesome. There are a ton of companies out there already who are doing great work democratizing the lowest hanging fruits of gaming mojo: The points and the leaderboards and the achievements and the avatar customization and the like. Fantastic. I love ‘em. But I also recognize that they’re really superficial. Shallow. Only scratching the surface.

Gamers know this too. That’s why at GDC this year, game developers were screaming bloody murder about the term “gamification” and the future it seems to be leading the industry towards. It’s not that these low hanging fruits are BAD. It’s just that there’s so much more vibrancy underneath the hood of gaming. It feels like an amazing opportunity squandered.

A surefire way to begin to understand this is to pay attention to the power of games. Play deliberately from time to time. Make note of the mechanics, mojo, and special sauce the game designer is employing to entice engagement. Note your feelings and engagement – and how different mechanics subtly influence them. When you’re addicted to finding lost cows – think about WHY you’re addicted.

It sounds simple enough – but it can actually be quite hard. After all, games are fun and entertaining. It’s a similar situation to losing 10 minutes browsing Facebook when you’re trying to get something done for a Facebook project But – as difficult as it can be – we must play deliberately in order to better understand games and how they do what they do.

Maybe just log the time under “research.” I won’t tell!