2010 Most Contagious

If you don't know Contagious, you should as it's an excellent resource for all things Creative across the world. Their end of year wrap is excellent, and covers some of the best creative campaigns of the year, from social, viral, PR and brand experience, it also takes a look at technology and the brands themselves.

This shows what an incredibly creative year 2010 has been.

Cheers

Nic

Most Contagious 2010 / www.mostcontagious.com

THe cloud - according to 10 year olds

Had to share this.

Wan't to know what the cloud is?

who do you ask?

A load of 10 year old's of course.

This will be part scary, part funny, part amazing for most. Enjoy.

Cheers

Nic

New Facebook profiles launched

Facebook love to tinker with their pages on a reasonably regular basis, and they've done so again - announcing a new look, and new features last night. The video below gives you an outline of what they've done, as ever - designed to make us even more social than we are.

As expected, they've made Facebook Places more visible, showing your check in's, in their attempt to steal the location world of Foursquare and Gowalla. You'll see your recently tagged snaps at the top of the profile (don't worry you can change them...), a better navigation and the ability to group your friends in to 'best', 'work' etc which is to depict the depth of relationships, and give people the opportunity to filter out what they hear from whom.

To activate yours, simply go here http://www.facebook.com/about/profile/

Feels like an improvement, let me know what you think.

Cheers

Nic

The ultimate Facebook album

We think this is cool.

Following on from A Life on Facebook (now removed due to copyright) last week, we also rather liked this Facebook app from Bouygues Telecom, France. Take your virtual social world, and create a coffee table book. Thanks to @adenhepburn for the find.

A great campaign to bring the digital and physical world's together. Enjoy.

Cheers

Nic

Facebook Places

Hi

It's been quite a month or so in the digital world, with launches including:

- Facebook Places

- Google Instant Search

- A new much improved Twitter homepage

- Google's social strategy steps forward with the Google me announcement.

We'll endeavour to tell you about all in separate posts this week. Let's start with Facebook Places, which launched in the States last month. The UK and Japan have since followed and we are due pretty soon, possibly October (if you go to your Facebook app on the Iphone you'll see the button is ready and waiting)

It's hardly a surprise as Facebook's move in to location has been mooted for quite some time, it follows the likes of Gowalla and Foursquare in to location, who combined have around 4 million users globally. Facebook, with its 500m will immediately have a leg up in the game of course...

As ever with any Facebook functionality, it's seemingly hit by controversy - this time over minors sharing their location. Any 13-17 year olds using the service will have added security but it's still kicked up a wee bit of a storm.

What's it all about? making friend connections easier, find out recommendations on restaurants, bars - whatever, receive discounts, special offers, special event invites - all based around your personal location.

Anyway, check it out here, and watch this space for the Australian launch.

Old Spice Case Study in full

Sorry, I'm a few weeks behind on this one, but I've been away - and this is worth noting anyway.

Some of you may well have seen the full case study by now, but if not - here it is in all its 4 minutes of glory. It's great to see the sales results back up the incredible buzz this campaign created on and offline - yes, advertising does work.

I fear we are all playing for second at the awards shows this year, and quite rightly too.

Cheers Nic

Can paid content work online?

7.1m people (unique) visited The Times Online website in May 2010.

Rupert Murdoch then launched a paid model on June 1st 2010 and reports are that the site visitation has dropped around 95% to 355,000 (once the free trial was over) - all of whom are now paying either £1 a day or £2 a week to access the content.

Being a former Times and Sunday Times reader in the UK, I'm mildly tempted to pay for the content, I certainly would if I were still in the UK as I do value some (not all) of their content. And the some is very much the key to the debate about how paid news content online is going to develop over time.

Not everyone agrees with me of course, and the numbers and blog feedback speak for themselves in terms of the general public. These two tickled me in particular:

"That sound you hear is champagne corks popping at the Guardian and BBC"

"Murdoch may be right in principle but The Times doesn't live in a vacuum. The issue is not whether or not the Times content is worth paying for, it's whether it's worth more than the papers still giving their content away. You don't have to out-run the grizzly bear, you just have to out-run your mate"

Murdoch is no mug though, and whilst he might have to take a short (ok, medium) term hit on revenue and traffic (The Times is losing $16m a month anyway...) he knows that ultimately, paid journalistic content is the model that will prevail, it has to (we are already paying on the ipad!).

At the moment however, I don't believe News International have got the model quite right. But you have to start somewhere and that somewhere is either pay for the lot, or don't pay at all. Pleasingly, for Rupert and friends is independent research that found a combined 23 percent of Times Online users rated themselves variations of “likely” to pay in the long run.

My preference however, would be for a narrowcast approach to the content, where users can pick and choose which parts of the wider Times Online or News International content portfolio they want to pay for. This, incidentally is a model I'd love to see in the Television world, where I can pick and choose channels from around the globe - but that's one for another day.

I don't necessarily find the Times Gardening news particularly interesting, so would rather not pay for it, I do however love their Sport coverage, and there are a couple of columnists in particular that I'd be willing to pay for - I just don't want to have to cover the rest of the content that I know I can get from the BBC (or whoever). The big challenge for News international, and whatever publisher goes next (New York Times will go paid in January 2011) is to work out what they are willing to give away (such as general news), and what is deemed as valuable (columnists, insight etc) and therefore paid. Once they do this, they'll have a working model that is the perfect mix of paid and free.

It's interesting to see what impact this shift has had on the Times social platforms in the last 2 months too. Whereas The Guardian in the UK, and all the papers in Australia use Twitter to announce news and drive traffic to their site, The Times twitter feed has turned in to aterribly drab, nothing affair pointing people at some blog content that remains free and archive news - yawn.

Again, they'll need to look at how they manage this over time as that's clearly not a working model for a social platform.

All credit to them however, the journey is underway, and I'm sure they never expected to get it right first time round.

Debate welcome.

Cheers Nic