Using video for an anti-bullying impact

November 4, 2010 By Leave a Comment

I found out about this campaign for anti-bullying charity Beatbullying via a good friend of mine who I suspect was involved as he’s a social media agency person.

After that long-winded attempt at disclosure, here’s the point. It’s not the first campaign to allow you to upload an image which is then placed in a video – but the choice of subject matter means that the personalisation is particularly well-suited to creating a pretty big impact…

Here’s the example:

And you can take part at http://unhappyslap.co.uk/. It’s good because the aim is to raise awareness and also to encourage 18-25 year olds to become BeatBullying Cybermentors and be trained to provide peer counselling to those who contact the charity.

Filed Under: social media marketing, video, Viral Marketing Tagged With: , , , , ,

Three more reasons not to under-estimate gaming

November 3, 2010 By 3 Comments

Most people are probably aware that I’m deeply interested in videogames and the gamification of the world which is occurring as more and more businesses and individuals look at what is able to be produced by game methodology.

For example:

  • More than a billion hours are being spent on Xbox Live each month. That’s just one of the three console platforms, and it equates to each of the 25 million current Xbox Live subscribers contributing around 40 hours of time each month.
  • Taken globally across every platform, there are figures as high as 3 billion hours a week. And while efforts to adapt that productivity are underway, it turns out that besides the potential risks of addiction etc, gaming actually may be beneficial to your health and wellbeing in some specific ways. That is – no matter how superficial the game and the output, by enabling you to experience positive emotions and social bonds, you’re likely to live longer, do better at work, and even have longer, happier marriages.
  • There’s a brilliant quote in the video of Tom Chatfield embedded below which sums up online gaming perfectly. For hundreds of thousands of years, humans have evolved in certain ways to perform tasks and get enjoyment from them. Crucially, videogames allow us to reverse-engineer everything, to create worlds which are perfectly tailored to the ways that humans have evolved.

Another of the points he makes which deserves repeating is the fact that an online game allows the measurement of over 1 billion data points – everything that anyone has ever done in that entire world can be tracked, measured and used for optimisation.

And it also justifies the inordinate amount of time I’ve spent in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 recently – the combination of a social group who are online almost nightly, and the rat pellet feed of rewards and achievements for frenetic (and frustrating on a slow net connection) action.

The other element of the games industry that will be of interest to the publishing/marketing/media non-gamers is that the games industry is relatively young, highly technical, and going through the same challenges as traditional media – how to compete with the challenges of a second-hand games market, how to utilise the ability for gamers to digitally download content, how to implement freemium and subscription models etc.

The difference is that there’s a lot less legacy and inertia to overcome – hence the success of Steam, or the release of the demo/minigame Dead Rising 2:Case Zero as a paid download exclusively for the Xbox 360. It sold 300,000 copies in the first week, and over 500,000 in the first fortnight as a prequel to the forthcoming full retail game, and as content sufficient enough to stand alone.

Through in motion-controls which are going to reach enough people to have an influence almost on a par with the touchscreens of smartphones and tablets, and there’s a lot there – something I’ll continue to expand upon…

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Filed Under: Digital Culture, Gamification, Videogames Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

Data isn’t worth much without hygiene…

November 1, 2010 By 2 Comments

In the digital world we’ve talked about the value of user data for quite a while – and it’s something direct marketing specialists have known for years. And yet it seems like the cost of old, outdated data and poor data hygiene is still ignored by so many companies.

In digital marketing terms, it can thousands, or even millions, of addresses which are being emailed and returning ‘soft’ and ‘hard’ bounces, with the cost of sending emails being wasted as those accounts are no longer active or checked.

Or wondering why you get a low response rate when it turns out only 1/5th of your registered users actually visited or logged into the site in the last 12 months.

Bad hygiene undermining brands:

I moved into my house over 3 years ago, and over that time we’ve returned tens, if not hundreds, of letters intended for the previous occupants – that’s something you tend to expect.

But one arrived today which stood out. It’s from a financial institution using details which are 3 years out of date – and furthermore, it’s a financial institution I use. So despite the fact I’ve been using their products with my home as the billing address for over 3 years, that didn’t stop them mailing the old residents.

And although I’ll just return it with the rest, it’s stuck in my mind when I consider the fact this company has probably more details and data on me than any non-Government agency, and yet still makes simple mistakes. If they can’t figure out that the details they’re using don’t add up, and don’t have any type of CRM flag to highlight the fact it doesn’t add up, do I really want them having access to more sensitive data?

Or will the wasted cost of one letter and envelope also potentially lose them a significant amount of business if I switch because they’ve lost my faith in them?

Filed Under: CRM, customer service, Direct Marketing, marketing Tagged With: , , , , , ,
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