Best of 2005: Ideas

The people at BusinessWeek have put up a nice slideshow about this. I’ve taken out the most compelling ones to me personally but you can find about 20 statements on the site.

  • Geography is so 20th century
  • What business really craves: simplicity
  • The way to succeed in the creative economy: innovate
  • DNA is not necessarily destiny after all
  • Shop ’til you feel it’s a full-blown experience
  • Google wants all your business
  • How the net can find markets for the obscure
  • Reaching the simultaneous media multitasking consumers
  • Fab fakes and cheap chic have created mass class
  • Where your kid is hanging out online
  • Tuning in to the channel of me
  • Radio dreams come alive in the podcast
  • Blogging the brand

Again it’s most amazing – although not a surprise – how much of the topics are of some sort related to the internet.

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The Time to Act Is Now

RSS icon“If you do a marketing site and you don’t have an RSS feed today you should be fired. I’ll say it again. You should be fired if you do a marketing site without an RSS feed. Saying that RSS is only for geeks today is like saying in 1998 that the Web was only for geeks. No one knows how long this ‘honeymoon’ will last. But ride the wave – and get into search engines quickly, inexpensively – by submitting your RSS feeds to them.”
– Robert Scoble, Microsoft

Out of the presentation of Steve Olechowski (Feedburner) on the Emerce Update Traffic Metrics Event. Or read the Emerce interview with Steve here (NL).

Best of Advertising

And yes, it is that period of the year were top 10 lists popup everywhere about any subject you can image. I’m trying to pick out the most interesting and today it’s all about Advertising.

Find the  top 10 ads of 2005 and even the top 10 viral videos of 2005 on BoreMe. On Adage we find the ten 2005 ads America won’t see and other lists in the Book of Tens. On the MM website we can see which Belgian agencies scored best on a creative scale in 2005, with 2 of the main networks (McCann & Publicis) right at the bottom of the list.

More to come later.

[Marketingfacts]

Top 10 Web Predictions for 2006

Happy 2006 for all in the online industry (and all the others too ofcourse). There was a great top 10 on Conversion Rater, let’s not forget to look back in 12 months and see if it was any good. I feel there’s certainly something to it:

  1. RSS will become two-way with the help of Simple Sharing Extensions from Microsoft
  2. Social news site Digg will expand into other content areas and media types and then will be acquired
  3. Web 2.0 will be looked down upon as a buzzword, and it’s usage will drop off dramatically
  4. Face-recognition photo application Riya will be acquired by a major player
  5. Some ecommerce shopping applications using the more recent advancements in social web technologies will be developed and will succeed
  6. Google Analytics will again drop the hammer on the web analytics industry
  7. A forward thinking company will build technology to support transparency, efficiency, and relationships in the online advertising business
  8. Microsoft will launch a contextual advertising network that will either be huge, or fail miserably
  9. Two to three new startups will be so cool and successful they will make the heroes of 2005 like Flickr and del.icio.us seem small and insignificant
  10. The venture capital investments and acquisition bubble will heat up even more, then deflate in the 2nd half of 2006 after a number of companies fail

Read more at Conversion Rater.

2.0

Web 2.0, Life 2.0, Brands 2.0, … it doesn’t stop these last couple of weeks. Every day you read posts on the internet about this next generation everything, like the change that’s hapening today is bigger than any change ever happened before. When we check out Wikipedia on the subject we can find that we’re at the second phase of Development of the internet. Basically it’s through this web 2.0 that we also learn about what should have been web 1.0 and even web 1.5!

There are clearly 2 opinions about all this next gen internet, and I belong to those who think all this web 2.0 is nothing more than a slogan, a buzzword to try to capture an ongoing evolution on the internet. There’s a good post of Russell Shaw on the Zdnet blog. Marketing did the trick, try a websearch on web 2.0 and you’ll be amazed on all you can find. The web always has been about a logical evolution, about ups & downs, about great new innovators & high user engagement.

Let’s call it a day and just keep on working on this evolution… to be able to look back after a couple of years when somebody comes up with web 3.0 to start all over again.

[Richard McManus on Read/Write Web]

What a week!

I had only just started with my blog for a week or so and already it’s been pretty silent these last days. Lot of stuff to write about though, just need to find time to do it :-)

Last week we’ve been discussing quite a bit on a very ‘interesting’ research. VMMa have done what they call the “Big Advertising Study“. This is typical sort of research media are doing to proved that they’re still the best to use only this time they did a really bad job. Ofcourse the winner is television in their study. What makes it so ‘funny’ is that they didn’t include the internet as part of the media landscape, while they ran the study 100% online to get the results in the first place.

Keep up the good work Vmma.

Trendwatching

Imagine how they keep coming up with those names: nouveau niche, massclusivity, tryvertising, the youniverse, generation c, twinsumers, life caching, … Every baby needs a name and I do love to read about all those new consumer concepts, but it’s also the reason why non-marketeers look at marketing guys & girls as those people that just know very well how to say stuff… even if it means nothing at all. And yes a marketeer wouldn’t be any good if he couldn’t tell stories about products & services, but let’s keep real value in the message please.

It also reminds me of a website I came across years ago, named the Web Economy Bullshit Generator. Add some of the new wordings and it would be totally up to date again and ready to use for all present powerpoint presentations about interactive marketing, online development, etc. Just add: SEO, many to many, API, RSS, podcast, blog, rich user experience, AJAX, tagging, consumer generated content, … and you would get your web 2.0 business model right there. Try it, and let me know if it worked for you.

9 December – a day without internet?

In The Netherlands the interactive agency Clockwork is organising the Working Day Without Internet on December 9th. Reason for this is that we tend to do all communications by mail & IM, even with a colleague sitting 5 feet away, instead of the face to face relationships. I agree that we all ways of communications have their own good & bad aspects and that we have to keep that in mind. I agree that not all communication should be done by email or IM, just as well as it makes no sense to walk the 10 feet to your colleague anytime you have something to tell her/him. And this is something we should all pay attention to.

Organising a day without internet however is not what I see as the solution. The extra fun part in this action is that they (Clockwork – the interactive agency) are using send-to-a-friend, RSS, … and other interactive online options to get people to join. Isn’t it weird you’re using emailing tools to ask people to stop emailing for a day?

RSS and me.

I’m a news addict and as such RSS is just it for me. Get all sorts of news feeds into my Outlook (with Attensa – nice beta btw) and follow up on them at least once a day. I also have a lot of queries on MSN Search – especially in the news search – that i turned into RSS, which also delivers some nice results.

Still I’m bothered by how some of the news sources threat this RSS feature and how they seem to see the advantage of it to get information in, but are afraid to use it in a decent way to get information out. One of the biggest newssites in Belgium (De Standaard) did a restyling of their website and used RSS feeds from international newssources to get short international news in their website. If you wanted fast news from them, you needed to install the ‘news clicker’… absurd. It took about two weeks, before they realised this was not done – too much complaints? – and started offering RSS again for their users. On the other hand, the biggest newspaper in Belgium (Het Laatste Nieuws) actually offers RSS for a quite long time, but only with the headers… yes, I do hate that.

But what I’m wondering most about is why it almost always stops at bringing news through RSS, and so why we don’t see much more of those dynamic feed options, like MSN Search is using for example. Why can’t I create my own RSS feed from a query on eBay for instance or a classifieds website. And why almost anybody seems to be exploring the advertising possibilities with those feeds. Might be I’m missing out on something, but show it to me then…