TV and Twitter: One strategy to save both?
Twitter recently made its S-1 filing available, thereby signaling its IPO plans. In the light of this IPO, Twitter faces two risks the company wants to address in order to get the most value out of the IPO.
First is the downward pressure on ad rates. The average price of ads has plunged by 46%, meaning Twitter would have to dramatically grow its customer base to offset this loss in income. This bring us to the second acknowledged risk: Twitter’s customer base is almost stagnating, with a small growth of only 2% in the last quarter. In order to tackle these risks, Twitter has to change its original advertisement revenue model.
At the same time, television is facing serious threats from online sources streaming video content to customers on demand. The content is streamed via laptops, smart phones and tablets. Even though television is still watched for many hours a day, the future might indicate no need for televisions. In addition, recorders make it possible for viewers to skip ads. This reduces the effectiveness and hence the trade power to charge large sums of money for displaying those ads.
It seems as if Twitter has found a great way to deal with its own risks, while addressing the difficulties faced by television companies: one cooperative strategy to save both.
Live television programs now offer the opportunity to show real-time tweets, and to have viewers vote by Twitter. Behind the scenes, stars use Twitter to convince the public to tune in on the television program. Moreover, Twitter is introducing a “TV trending” box, showing popular shows in users’ timelines, and a stream to discuss TV related content. But the cooperation extends. Whenever live television shows an important moment, say a goal made during a great match, a clip of this moment is tweeted, with a six second commercial in front of it. Not only will this convince people to tune in, consumer experience is enhanced since Twitter is now serving premium video content. Furthermore, Twitter recently acquired Bluefin Labs, a small company that has developed technology to push ads to Twitters users, adapted to the commercials that were shown during the television show you were watching. It is said the effectiveness for TV spots double when accompanied by a social media push, since the message is reinforced while its still fresh.
Will this new advertisement revenue model be enough for Twitter and television companies to address their risks?
References:
Bercovici, J. 2013, Can Twitter save TV? (And can TV save Twitter?), Accessed via: http://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffbercovici/2013/10/07/can-twitter-save-tv-and-can-tv-save-twitter/3/
Thompson, C. 2013, No more secrets: Twitter IPO filing is now public, Accessed via: http://www.cnbc.com/id/101074151
“Virtual property insurance”
For the last few years, the virtual world has changed substantially and continues to grow within time. Virtual worlds are places where individuals can create an own avatar of character. It’s an online simulation of the real world in which the users can interact with each other. Most of these games are known worldwide like World of Warcraft, Lord of the Rings and Final Fantasy. These are a few of these virtual games which are extremely popular nowadays.
The Rapid growth in popularity has not only attracted unwanted attention of both hackers and organized crime, but has also led to virtual property thefts. As player investment in virtual worlds continues to grow, “virtual property rights” and the security of virtual property has become an important issue.
An example of fraud is that a player promises to pay for a particular service then either the buyer refuses to pay afterward, or pays first and the seller refuses to perform the service to the buyer’s satisfaction. The only thing a player can do in such situation is to hope for the game operators to resolve the issue by intervention. But in some games like War of Warcraft, the game operators don’t have the authority to intervene, so it’s easy to get away with this kind of fraud.
Some examples:
A Chinese woman attempted to claim her share of virtual property from her former husband because they had shared the same game account, this had led all the way to the court but a Beijing judge denied her claim in December 2010, according to China Daily (Technewsdaily).
Another more extreme example was in 2005. A Chinese man had a dispute over the theft of a virtual sword. The victim had reported the game operators and the police, who claimed there was nothing they could do. This dispute had finally led to the murder of the thief in real life.
Because of the increasing number of disputes between user and game operators, often related to the loss or theft of virtual property, a Chinese company has unveiled a “virtual property insurance”. The insurance will help to reduce risks for online gaming companies, as the companies which purchase the insurance will be covered to compensate customers in the event of lost or stolen property.
Do you think that the insurance of virtual property will lead to less real world issues or in extreme cases prevent crimes? Could you imagine similar insurance spreading beyond China? Some researchers go further than that, they have argued that crimes in virtual worlds are as real as crimes in real life.
http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~cat/papers/vetr.pdf
http://scholarship.law.berkeley.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1077&context=bjcl
http://www.zdnet.com/chinese-firm-touts-first-virtual-property-insurance-2062301124/
http://resources.infosecinstitute.com/security-threats-in-virtual-world/
http://www.technewsdaily.com/5098-insurance-virtual-items-games.html
“NSA Has Built Its Own, Secret, Warrantless, Shadow Social Network, And You’ve Already Joined It”
Most likely some of you have been following the (still ongoing) developments surrounding the Edward Snowden case. In May 2013, Snowden leaked secret documents to The Guardian, documents that reveal that a government agency has been intercepting and collecting U.S and European telephone metadata as well as data from Internet surveillance programs.
According to top-secret documents the Guardian obtained, The National Security Agency has direct access to the systems of Google, Facebook, Apple and other US Internet giants, The NSA access is part of a previously undisclosed program called PRISM, which allows officials to collect material including search history, the content of emails, file transfers and live chats. Extensive, in-depth surveillance on live communications is facilitated and stored. Without warrants this agency can target any customer of participating firms, inside and outside of the US.
Shortly after the first Snowden revelations the people from Datacoup put together a spoof website called GETPRISM, which looks a lot like the announcement of a new social network, but the creators being the NSA. Check out the website… it’s pretty funny, until you realize it’s actually how the NSA is operating right now.
The agency was authorized to conduct “large-scale graph analysis on very large sets of communications metadata without having to check foreignness”. They have essentially built its own “shadow” social network in which it tries to create a “social graph” of pretty much everyone that everyone knows.
The leaked documents reveal that, “the program is able to augment the communications data with public, commercial and other sources, including bank codes, insurance information, Facebook profiles, passenger manifests, voter registration rolls and GPS location information, as well as property records and unspecified tax data”
Ever since these revelations, numerous Internet campaigns have spawned the web to combat these NSA snooping habits. The anti-NSA campaign on Buybott.com gives the Internet user useful tools/sites/apps on how to preserve their privacy. A small selection recommended websites:
Search engines:
Startpage has exactly the same results as Google without privacy concerns
DuckDuckGo a bit different but has some very useful features and privacy worry free
Email services:
StartMail the private email service being developed by StartPage
Browsing:
Firefox the very customizable browser
Mailvelope browser extension that allows to exchange OpenPGP encrypted emails
Whatsapp/iMessage:
Threema very secure and encrypted Whatsapp alternative
Cloud backup/Dropbox, Google Drive, Skydrive etc:
Wuala very secure online backup and synchronization service
MEGA 50 gb online backup
What do you think? Would you ever consider switching to any of these alternatives?
Sources:
- http://www.buycott.com/campaign/507/stop-nsa-s-prism-save-your-privacy
- http://mobile.nytimes.com/2013/09/29/us/nsa-examines-social-networks-of-us-citizens.html
- http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130928/22450824685/nsa-has-built-its-own-secret-warrantless-shadow-social-network-youve-already-joined-it.shtml
Referrals? Why should we use them?
Referrals are already very powerful to use; according to some; but why are they useful for a company? Nowadays people can refer a product or service to other people by social media. Most of the times you buy a product and you can refer it to friends, family, colleagues and others. In this way companies try to use word-of-mouth in the online environment. Word-of-mouth is a very powerful tool, because people are more likely to buy products when they hear from friends or experts that it is a good product. So it is likely that referrals are powerful for companies.
The article A. Green (2013) suggests that companies should use referrals, because they are a powerful tool to convince people to buy the product. But companies do not know how they should use it. Most companies stimulate referrals at every social media platform where the companies should look which platform has the most interaction and referrals. For some companies it might be useful to use Google+ where visual companies could make better use of Pinterest and Instagram. The article states that 60% of the social media traffic comes from referrals and that the conversion is the highest among people that were referred to the website.
The table at the right shows he different kind of visits to a website by different kind of contact points. Most people got to the website by an organic search engine like Google or go to the website directly. After this the highest way people got to the website were referrals. But even though organic search got more visitors to the website, referrals has an conversion rate of almost 4 times higher than organic search. This means that people that go the website by a referral are more valuable customers for the company than customers that go to the website in any other way. Referrals are part of the social media platforms, but this research separated them. The table shows that more people go to the site by referral than social media. This implicates that it is more useful to make interesting posts than to redirect customers to a new product on you website by making a Facebook post.
Referrals also benefit the brand awareness of the company. Referrals increase the exposure of a post, because people send it to people they know who will get a positive view of the company. Because when your friend likes it, it must be a good company right? In this way companies should not focus their social media strategy on promotions or other type of commercial activities. Companies should focus their social media strategy on producing interesting posts that make people enthusiastic, exited and people need to find it interesting to share the post to other people they know. In this way referrals themselves can be more powerful than social media posts.
Sources:
http://socialmediatoday.com/agreen1019/1794401/do-social-media-referrals-have-future-your-business
http://socialmediatoday.com/sashattuck/1394651/want-increase-conversions-focus-referral-traffic
Tech of the Week – Team 21. Tom Tom Mobile vs. Waze
As with many other industries, the evolvement of various technologies has changed the market for navigation quite drastically in the past years. I guess we all still remember going on holidays with our parents, sitting in the back of the car and watching them get lost using a road map to find the way. An actual, printed map. Out of paper. However, if you look into cars today, it is rather unlikely that you will actually find one of these maps.
The last decade has seen more and more cars being equipped with in-dash navigation systems, which are built-in navigation system into the car. Also, people started using PNDs, which are personal or portable navigation devices. But really, even in-dash navigation and PNDs are becoming old-fashioned these days. The clear trend we find today is towards mobile devices and the navigation applications on them.
Two of these applications, TomTom Mobile and Waze, and how they differ from each other are presented in the illustration below (click for larger picture).
In all, it is fair to assert that utility to users derived from Waze can be substantially larger comparing to TomTom Mobile. What makes applications popular and convenient is often their integration of social media features and management of big data collected from its users, which allows hypertargeting. With this respect, Waze is ahead because of its explicit integration of social networking and crowdsourcing into its end product. Although TomTom has a high quality product, it has nevertheless not learned how important it is to efficiently leverage new trends in the digital marketplace. The attempts to introduce user-generated services (TomTom Traffic and Speed Cameras) show how the company struggles to take advantage of big data by charging its users for such service, thereby limiting the access to freely available information from its user base.
References:
Channel4News. (2011). Waze: the next big social network in the UK?
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=Apjn0pLjD0s> Last
accessed 1 October 2013.
Lendino, J. (2012). The History of Car GPS Navigation. PCMAG,
<http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2402755,00.asp> Last accessed October 3
2013.
TomTom. (2013). About TomTom – History.
<http://corporate.tomtom.com/history.cfm?history=3> Last accessed 2 October 2013.
Waze. (2013). Waze: Way to go. <http://www.waze.com/faq/> Last accessed 2 October
2013.
The ITO Revolution
IT outsourcing (ITO) is defined as the practice of seeking resources outside of an organizational structure for all or part of and IT function.
An increasing number of multinational companies are outsourcing their IT-related activities. These companies take advantage of ITO for functions ranging from infrastructure to software development, maintenance and support. Moreover, technologies such as Business Intelligence (BI), Development Operations (DevOps) and Near Field Communication (NFC) have a strong impact the business success of companies. As a result, the development and the implementation of these technologies are being progressively outsourced due to challenging go-to-market strategies and growing time constraints. Hence, it can be stated without any doubt that the IT industry is quickly moving away from traditional outsourcing into a more strategic partnership with vendors, giving birth to a real ITO Revolution.
These trends force IT solutions providers to adopt new technologies, to change their standard methodologies as well as to review their business models to retain their existing clients and to remain competitive. Rapid development, prompt implementation and smooth transition are key criteria companies follow when selecting their new IT supplier. Simultaneously, however, high standards of quality must be met. It is for these reasons that most companies tend to select IT service providers with mature implementation models and with proven experience within their industry.
ITO programs are leading large corporations to make wide use of the experience and the insights of consulting companies for their decision-making process and for IT roadmap creation. By outsourcing the implementation and the transition phases of the outsourcing program itself they allow their internal staff to focus on their current operations and responsibilities.
As Bluewolf (a consulting company) mentioned: “IT outsourcing is evolving into a strategic tool that reflects today’s rapidly changing business and technology landscape. Once a tourniquet to cut costs, it has matured and become a business imperative”.
source:
http://money.howstuffworks.com/outsourcing1.htm
I %@#?!**&# hate Information Strategy
I think I have you attention now. Why? Because extreme emotions are extremely interesting.
Marketing efforts have already been using emotional appeal for as long as anyone can remember, but with web 2.0 and all that goes beyond it, emotions find their way back to the company more and more easily. Especially social media are filled with emotional statements directed at products, companies and initiatives. The right tweet can cause a Kickstarter to be funded in seconds, whilst the wrong one can lead to extreme losses of revenue or even bankruptcy.
Research shows that the logic behind this has to do with the perception of emotional statements. Extreme emotions are most effective, but extreme anger dominates all and could spread through a network with amazing speed.
The obvious IS implication aims at using social media channels in a way to keep your customers satisfied and rid yourself of negative media presence (granted, there are some prime examples of hilariously bad CRM).
There is another connection, however, and it has more to do with overall strategy. Some companies have created an image that is based on how bad they are and thrive in it. The Dutch Railways is hated throughout the country, but society seems to have accepted it (“One flake of snow and all trains stop? What an idiots, haha”). On the other hand, Apple has a clear attention base of lovers and haters, who are both extreme, but both powerful marketing devices. The same trend is visible in the music business, where some artist seem to actively create a ‘hate-network’ through which they get extreme media attention (#twerking anyone?) and others (for instance Justin Bieber) create a network of lovers and haters who will both go through great lengths to be heard.
Extreme emotions are out there and could pose a threat. However, if you are able to get a spin on it, they could prove to be a great strategic asset.
Source: http://mashable.com/2013/09/16/social-networks-emotions/
TotW; The Ownership model versus the streaming model in the Music Industry (Team 22)
According to (Lessin, 2013), the current digital music market generated revenues of more than $5.6 billion, of which streaming services account for almost 20% ($1.1 billion). This is up from 14% last year, and is expected to increase significantly in the future.
In our paper we compared two distinctive music distribution business models that dominate the way people get hold of music today.
On the one hand we have an ownership model, with iTunes as its flag bearer and AmazonMP3 to a lesser degree. Both products work the same way, on a pay per download basis. We looked specifically at the use of bundle pricing, according to (Bocksted et. al., 2012) consumers behave differently under different seller circum-stances. Buying multiple items instead of single items could have that effect. According to the article there does have to be price difference to make this attractive. Although both products sell albums that…
View original post 545 more words
Information Strategy 
Recent Comments