Make Things People Want

A really nice view of the fundamental changes taking place in communications as audiences are impacting and influencing brands, from the Smithery blog. As usual, the prospect of truly useful and loveable communications products is mouth-watering for anyone interested in making good things. Frustratingly, though, there still seem to be so few great examples in the realworld - same ones coming up again and again.

More Ctrl

We soft-launched the latest version of the long-running Topman Ctrl platform this week. Over the next month, as increasing functionality rolls-out, it should become clear that this is neither your average brand entertainment platform nor your average web music destination. But first, here’s Radio 1 new music sage Huw Stephens – who’ll be steering the Topman Ctrl ship alongside his guests this year – to give a little intro:

What’s so exciting for us about this project is the way in which the format brings down the walls between destination site and social media, between artist and fan, between social content and traditional media.

Instead of managing a few digital destinations we are trying to blow open as many of them as possible and create content touchpoints in every corner of the web and beyond. Far from creating chaos though, we will be following an iterative approach and locking in a strategy that emerges around the ones that work best for our objectives.

Creatively we wanted to grow Ctrl’s position as a ‘filter’ for musical discovery keeping it at the forefront of this kind of brand music proposition – Ctrl is an original and has to stay a few strides ahead as more and more brands jump into this arena.

We believe this is something that audiences can care about, love using and that brings real value to their world. If you agree, check in with www.topman.com/ctrl and join us next month when the adventure begins.

thisis MY jam

We’re clearly now into something of a social long-tail in which every possible niche interest an audience might build a community around is being investigated by eager digital entrepreneurs. Led primarily by mobile community media sharing, location data and other possibilities of the zeitgeist, it is rare that a service emerges here that’s driven by primary computer interactions. The music sharing service This Is My Jam is a bit of an exception and it has proved impossibly sticky in the Bounce offices since its Beta launch a few months back.

On the face of it, there’s not much to it - pick a track weekly (or daily for those heavy-users) and TIMJ will serve it up from a streaming source somewhere on the Interwebs (invariably YouTube) and share it with your ‘followers’ with or without your clipped commentary on the selection.

And that’s precisely why it works so well.

Whilst we get overwrought about the invasive (un-sociable) implications of Facebook’s frictionless sharing - TIMJ is focussed on a very considered, very personal sharing selection. Like Twitter - whose simple social infrastructure it follows - it enables a type of social interaction that introduces you to new people who share your (in this case very-focussed) passions. Rather than connecting you to old school friends and people you might enjoy a better social interaction with down the pub.

Yup, this is the long-tail and TIMJ may yet prove to be a ghetto for music snobs but there are some important lessons for anyone in this space; indeed, anyone that wants to capture an audience with online media content:

1. Simple is beautiful - as yet there is no flab hanging off this service, the legacy of previous pivots not yet subject to the ruthless axe of form and function.

2. Choice - we think it really matters. Isn’t sharing fatigue the only logical conclusion of automated ‘frictionless’ sharing?

3. Passion and discovery - want to build a tight community that loves your product? Let them congregate around something they really love. One really nice thing about TIMJ is the daily playlist it provides, compiled by people whose taste you trust.

4. Refine a behaviour - services don’t need to reinvent the wheel in this environment. We were already jamming YouTube clips on our Twitter accounts years ago but having a place to go do it amongst the likeminded entrenches the behaviour, makes it feel special.

To return to the point about mobile - this is something TIMJ are obviously working hard on and the experience is always improving. But how many streaming music experiences can you point to that are worth bothering with on mobile? Once it’s bought up and integrated into one of the big streaming services and the tracks loaded into your lockers, the story may be a different one.

But then, what happens to the bloody catalogue?!

Try it out: www.thisismyjam.com

A month on Twitter #5

If you’ve been following the year-in-review pieces flooding your Twitter feed in the last week, you’ll agree it’s been quite a year and 2012 holds no shortage of thrills yet to be uncovered.

But it’s not our aim here to review the year, although we do offer our pick of the 2012 previews. Instead, we focus on just a couple of issues that arose over the last month on the Bounce Twitter feed that shed light on some of our key things to watch in 2012. Firstly, the emergence of reconfigured cultural products (in this example - films) as they evolve in our two-way media culture. Secondly, we consider the evolution of ‘sharing’, as we grapple with Facebook’s redefinition of the rules with its ‘frictionless’ approach which proposes sharing as a form of always-on life archiving.

Read more

Deezer Music Wall nominated for Econsultancy Innovation Award

We’re very happy this week to discover that our launch campaign for streaming music service Deezer has been nominated for an Innovation Award by the discerning folk at Econsultancy in the category of ‘Innovation in Social Media’. The winners will be announced at the ceremony, taking place at a swanky London hotel on 23^rd of February.

This seems like a timely opportunity to go into the project in a bit more detail with an overview of how things worked. You be the judge as to whether we’re a worthy winner.

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The idea was to draw attention to Deezer with an activity that reinforced their critical differentiator from the music streaming competition – that this is a service by music lovers for music lovers with editorial, human recommendation and more than mere hardcore search-powered tech.

So, we developed a Facebook integrated analogue/digital (which may just be a fancy way of saying experiential/digital) experience encouraging people to share favourite songs and stories to be brought to life in real-time by illustrators working on an installation in London. Essentially, this creative concept brought the Deezer strapline promise – “Where Music Comes Alive” – to life with a perfectly physical, interactive expression of just that.

Built from hundreds of illustrated postcards, the Wall was experienced online through a gigapixel image in which you could zoom into each card and even play the relevant track.

It lives on and you play around with it right HERE.

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1. The real-world experience

Between 19 – 24th October a group of illustrators and a gigapan-operated camera were installed in the Old Truman Brewery, off Brick Lane in East London. Through a Facebook application, audiences shared their favourite songs and the stories behind them. Illustrators turned each of these stories into unique hand-illustrated postcards and added them to the wall. The wall itself grew into both a visual and literal expression of the brand.

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2. The digital interface

Users could view the progress of the wall through a regularly updating gigapixel image that allowed it to be browsed from afar and zoomed into in close-up. As individual cards were selected in close-up, details then loaded in allowing the associated track to be played via Deezer, the track title and user comment to be displayed, and that card to be shared through Facebook and Twitter.

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3. Sharing

With 1000 entries we were able to send Facebook and Twitter notifications when each user entered their track. But the real excitement kicked in when a user’s card was created and added to the wall. At this point we posted to their feed both a packshot and direct link that zoomed elegantly into the gigapixel image within the Facebook app to focus on that individual’s card. These then became the focus for further conversations within Facebook. This turned 1000 entries into hundreds of thousands of impressions across Facebook.

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Brand awareness was achieved both on the ground for a week with a living, breathing brand embodiment in high-footfall Brick Lane, through NME and Facebook advertising and, most effectively, through the sharing across Facebook and Twitter.

A new player was introduced to the busy UK music-streaming market with an exciting, engaging and truly social experience. Complex in behind-the-scenes execution, the user journey itself was beautifully simple and depended only on the demographic’s willingness to express their individuality through music. They were rewarded with a unique, creative and shareable memento which achieved the elusive but highly prized goal of all social marketing: social currency.

The Deezer Music Wall on Facebook

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The Deezer Music Wall on Monday lunchtime

The Deezer Music Wall

If it’s been a little quiet ‘round these parts (and on the Twitter feed) in recent weeks, this is our excuse.

http://apps.facebook.com/deezermusicwall/

For the UK launch of the rather marvellous Deezer streaming music service, we’ve been beavering away to create this lovely installation and Facebook application based on people’s music stories. A kind of digital-analogue-digital user experience, it works like this:  

Users pick a favourite track on Facebook, write a line about it and our team of illustrators down at the Truman Brewery create your very own card which will then be added to the wall. You can browse a gigapixel image of the wall, play tracks, share on FB and Twitter etc. 

We’ll be putting together a more detailed case study soon but in the meantime if you have any questions about how it was done you can reach us here @bouncedigital

Pictures up next…

F8: Talking loud, saying something

For a Facebook sceptic, yesterday’s F8 announcements were an eye-opener. There’s a lot to take in but boiled to its essence, the big news is #1 the timeline and #2 integration with key third-party entertainment content brands. As with all things in Facebook’s social graph stew, the two are intrinsically linked and it’s these sort of tangential connections between all things in the ecosystem that makes the sum total of all yesterday’s news hard to process - there’s no neat beginning and end to the features.

The introduction of third party content seems like a pretty seismic development for a platform which, in the words of James Brown, often amplified the business of ‘talking loud, saying nothing’. Now, integration of services like Spotify and Deezer allow realtime sharing of the music that you are listening to, the articles that you are reading - and with the integration of Netflix so far in Canada and Latin America - the TV and films you view. Crucially, this takes out that moment of consideration in the sharing process - the one where you think ‘how will sharing this make me look to my friends’ - instead replacing it with an unmediated stream of the audiences’ actual media consumption. So, enjoy watching your most considered friends unmasked as avid Coronation Street viewers, lovers of REO Speedwagon and aficionados of the films of Kevin Bacon.

The Timeline is a much richer way of presenting the individual’s story and answers the issue of what to do with The Wall, given that most people now only interact with the News Feed. We’re big fans of the lovely Memolane start-up here and there’s a similar richness to the Facebook timeline which was influenced by the personal infographics or ‘scrapbooks’ of designer Nicholas Felton (pictured).

This is a really exciting development for people like us, whose ambition is to make rich social applications that enable audiences to connect in social media and celebrate passions and interests. Apps now feel so much more central to the experience and will have to be smarter, richer and more personalised for the most sophisticated users.

Content, of course, becomes ever-more the principle currency for brands looking to interact in these spaces and the announcement of verb-based ‘actions’ to add crucial nuance to the act of ‘Liking’ content, opens up a new seam of advertising potential through Facebook’s Sponsored Stories product. Integration with the social graph is crucial to driving the potential of this data and the humble Facebook brand Page - always a thin proposition - now looks woefully insufficient.

The overall impact is a significant further stride towards Zuckerberg’s ambition to channel your web experience through Facebook, building a sort of shopping mall of digital content (albeit with Deezer, The Guardian, Netflix and others boasting some pretty great shops). Perhaps there are those of us who will prefer to continue making trips to boutique high street shops but, unquestionably, these are huge advances for the world’s favourite social network.

A month on Twitter #4

Oddly, it seemed to us whilst absorbing the organic algorithms of Twitter that the last month went a bit quiet. Do you find that?? Perhaps we were just busy. Anyways, there was still plenty of brain food for those of us that care about digital creativity and marketing.

We tried to stop thinking about Google+ vs. Facebook and clear some headspace to wrestle with the question of whether agencies can create successful apps with a shelf life beyond the campaign. We also wondered if Twitter will struggle with its newly commercialised focus; even considered that its new approach to Promoted Tweets might represent something of a new paradigm in the world of earned and bought-media. Along the way, we check-in with a music industry struggling to nail apps with what we scientifically refer to as ‘giveashitability’, and luxury fashion brands that want to be both social but exclusive.

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Agencies vs. start-ups

A common theme here, and one that saw quite a lot of Twitter chatter over the last month, is that of the blurring of lines between agencies and start-ups. First there was this piece from Winston Binch that proposed a new agency job role: Invention Strategy. He does use the ‘word’ ideation (are we alone in wanting to flee for the countryside every time we hear this?!) but the point is a good one and we think it boils down to this. Agencies are not yet managing to create digital products that show an audience to investment ratio that wouldn’t make a start-up blush. Why? What’s the solution? Well, it certainly can’t hurt to bring the start-up mindset into the agency and try and learn from the horse’s mouth.

A similar question was posed with more insight into the hurdles presented by agency culture in this piece from the mobileinc.com blog - ’Can The Next Instagram/Hipstamatic/Klout/Angry Birds Be Born Within An Agency?’

Making music apps matter

This article on Billboard presented yet another angle from which to look at the challenges of birthing apps people love. “[N]ew music apps get released every week,” it points out. “Many make a huge splash, become the talk of technology blogs and are never heard from again.” The issue is that if left to identify a music issue that needs solving, chances are that a music fanatic will identify an issue that only afflicts similarly fanatical music types. Maybe this is where agency discipline in the, er, ideation process could contribute objectivity to start-up culture.

Twitter Adds Ads

As Twitter continues to pursue more and more advertising revenues, the service announced that Promoted Tweets will be driven into your streams via both Twitter’s own interfaces and those of third party developers, meaning that wherever you are and whether or not you follow the relevant brand, you’ll be seeing this content. Interesting in so much as it proves that ad inventory needn’t reside in the destination - allowing us to conceive of a future of not just liquid content formats but also liquid ad content. We’re left wondering if the risk is that these ‘talking at you’ messages risk degrading the quality of the ‘talking with you’ messages that brands who have invested in Twitter enjoy from fostering community themselves. The more we think about this, the more it starts to look like a paradigm shift in the world of earned and bought media.

Does luxury do ‘democracy’?

Great article here that charts the initial mistrust of digital media (and its democratisation of the brand) in the world of luxury fashion, and how indifference in this sector has quickly shifted to urgency. It’s hard to go social and retain mystique; worse it’s possible that social accessibility brings a tawdry edge to brands that thrive on exclusivity. Tablet access clearly introduces an altogether more exclusive and creatively rich social experience that these brands can exploit. Initiatives like Burberry’s oft-cited Art of the Trench show that, in collaboration with respected content producers (in this case The Sartorialist) luxury brands can crowd-source content and yet still maintain an exacting creative presentation.

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Next month looks jam-packed and we’ll be watching the Facebook F8 developer conference tomorrow closely and no doubt reviewing the fallout on this very article next month. We’ve also got a few interesting projects of our own underway which we’ll be able to announce in the coming weeks, @bouncedigital and we’ll leave you with this thought: