Sony

XBox Newsjack: PS Experience “A Nice Event”

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This past weekend, it seemed all eyes were on Sony thanks to the announcement-heavy PlayStation Experience event in Las Vegas, where we learned and saw more of the PS4‘s 2015 lineup. But next year will also be a big year for Microsoft and the Xbox One, executive Phil Spencer reminds fans.

Read the story: www.gamespot.com

This is a polite way for MSFT  to try and newsjack the Sony event which introduced the limited edition 20th Anniversary Edition Playstation 4.

Sony billed the PlayStation Experience as a community focused event, but clearly used it to focus a tremendous PR blitz premiering tons of titles.

PlayStation boss Scott Rohde hyped it saying:

This event that we’re gonna hold; this is pretty unprecedented. It’s an event for the fans, and I am so incredibly geeked about it. We’re gonna show you a bunch of stuff that maybe we shouldn’t show you yet.

 

Dewd…

 

The Jolt! from ckwrites 05.21.14

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So AT&T is about to gobble up DirecTV – talk about convergence. Lot of moving parts there. Here on the high mesa, Spring finally looks like it’s here to stay.

Here’s The Jolt! from ckwrites.

Pitches

Remember this great lyric?

You’ve got to know when to hold ’em
Know when to fold ’em
Know when to walk away
Know when to run.

Partners,  The Gambler by Mr. Kenny Rogers (and that’s a link to the original music video) is one of my favorite life lessons.

And in my opinion, 5 Warning Signs Your Sales Opportunity Won’t Close from Jill Konrath’s new book, Agile Selling, is a modern day equivalent.

This is tough love advice, but then the old gambler was no fool and neither is Jill. (A recent post covered her equally gimlet eyed Crap Selling Toolkit.)

  1. Not sure when they’ll change: If they’re hemming and hawing about when they’ll change, they’re not a prospect right now.
  2. Shift in Priorities: If they tell you other, more urgent priorities have emerged, they’re not going to be buying in the near future.
  3. Boss Isn’t Sold: If they tell you that the boss isn’t sold, it’s not likely you’ll get a signed contract anytime soon.
  4. Unresponsive: If they don’t respond to your calls or emails, take them off your prospect list right now.
  5. Interested but expecting delays: You’ll want to keep in touch if they are still very interested but projecting significant delays – but don’t count on them.

Learning to let go is an invaluable skill… It keeps you realistic about the opportunities (or lack of them) in front of you. It frees up mental energy to pursue new prospects that you have a better chance of winning. It keeps you agile.

http://ckwrites.info/1o8S6ja

Content

How do you activate your sponsorship of the World Cup?

If you’re Sony you hire a bunch of really smart Brits from Isobar U.K. to create a online platform, called One Stadium Live. It’s a new form of crowd sourced real time publishing that will bring together conversations and content across Twitter, Facebook and Google+ before and during the World Cup.

Nick Bailey, CEO and executive creative director of Isobar U.K. describes it as being “like a social broadcast channel for football. It will be like turning social content into TV content. You’ll be able to tune in and see what people are saying, but in an engaging and entertaining way. It won’t feel like just a load of Twitter hashtags – it will be a snapshot of what the world is feeling.”

Here is the staggering statistic driving this:

The last tournament in 2010 attracted two billion TV viewers, and since then internet use has increased by 53%, Twitter use by 13,500%, and Facebook has gone from 300 million to one billion users. Twitter expects 60% of all tweets during matches will be World Cup-related.

http://ckwrites.info/1k0A7ey 

The Big AHA!

What does great branding look like?

Amazing for one thing.

Benetton was one of the first to hire a creative director and do really edgy work – I’m talking 25 years ago. So its good to see that their passion for design and their mastery of the edge is once again (or is it still) part of their culture.

Each issue of their magazine, Colors Magazine, (which was launched in 1991!) is dedicated to a single theme – the current issue is Moving.

“It was started with the idea of making a magazine that was different from the other magazines that were around,” said Cosimo Bizzarri, executive editor of Colors Magazine. “It was based around this premise that globalization means diversity and diversity was a good thing.”

Colors is developed at Benetton’s think tank Fabrica (it means factory) whose mission is to be a communications research center. The site includes social campaigns, design, editorial and news. It’s a trip and well worth a browse.

Always changing and always staying the same: sounds a lot like the world Colors has been covering for 20 years.

http://ckwrites.info/1h1Vzv0

Metrics & ROI

How do you make all that data look like you own it?

The short answer is, get your art squad a copy of Visage, a new graphics app from Column Five. Column Five was one of the pioneering firms in the infographic space, so developing compelling ways to present data is very much part of their DNA.

This is a fun story for me since I’ve been chatting about dashboards and the like with Jake Burkett, one of the co-founders, since Visage was the vaguest outline of an idea.

Visage is an app that was designed from the ground up to incorporate each client’s color palette, fonts and symbols. In fact they’ll even customize your copy to meet your brand guidelines. Not sure how long that can possibly last, but it’s a great deal for you early adopters.

Go to the site and you can download A Business Guide To Visual Communications which explains “why our brains love visuals.” Page 6 invites you to Find The Story In Your Data and reviews many of the visualizations that are commonly used, while page 13 offers up 10 Tips for Design. I love the brand promise:

We believe that beautiful data visualization should be available to anyone… Our unique SaaS application transforms the uninspired data in your reports into beautiful, branded visualizations that make your message more impactful—and make your work look good.

http://ckwrites.info/1jxmcxv

Marketing 501

Is content marketing the most complex thing you’ve ever tried to do?

For me the answer is yes – by a wide margin. It is something that no company I have ever worked with is prepared to do. It requires silo busting, great instincts and lightning decision making and processing. The combination of tools and techniques is one thing, but the number of departments, agencies and partners involved makes it exponentially more complex. Add to that the relentless pressure to produce more and more against a tight calendar, and its no wonder that people are developing apps to try to manage it all.

The root cause is not surprising:

Altimeter finds 70% of marketers lack a consistent or integrated content strategy. Despite a growing awareness (and acceptance) of the fact that content is the atomic particle of all marketing — essential for fueling paid, owned, and earned media — organizations lack a cohesive, coherent, strategic approach to content.

The Content Marketing Software Landscape: Marketer Needs and Vendor Solutions from the Altimeter Group tries to make sense of the options and match needs and solutions.

Much of the report looks at how three content marketing scenarios are driving the evolution of these tools.

Feed the Beast addresses the unending demand to create more content faster.

Refine asks how the enterprise can get smarter about what it’s doing and how how it’s measuring the results.

Govern looks at two issues which must be solved if the content is to be timely and relevant.

  • First how to scale a content marketing initiative across the organization. This in my opinion is essential if a company wants to access the in-depth knowledge that is located across the organization.
  • Second, how to operate in real-time (e.g. at the speed of tweet) and still ensure compliance.

Even if you don’t have to deal with this (yet), it will give you some insight into what is going on in other parts of your client’s organization.

http://ckwrites.info/R23GAD

If you haven’t subscribed to The Jolt! from ckwrites yet, please do. Just click here – easy, peasy and done.

And please be sure to bookmark ck Curates. Because you never know when you will be in desperate need of an alternative activity to replace the one that you are not particularly engaged in.

 

The Jolt! from ckwrites 03.05.2014

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That was an interesting week that was between the Oscars, the weather and the Ukraine. Yikes…

Here’s The Jolt!

Pitches

What’s the worst thing you can do when you are presenting?

The answer is going to surprise you. And it may well seem counter-intuitive.

I was being asked for any tips or tricks that might help him be successful. I asked him where he was in the process of being ready, and this is what he told me: “I’ve written out the full speech and I’m almost done memorizing it.

Here’s the point. There is a better way. 

  1. Build an outline
  2. Develop bullet points
  3. Add color (tell a story)
  4. Practice

Yes it might take awhile to get rid of that PowerPoint printout with your every word below every slide – but on the other hand, wouldn’t you rather be a better speaker?

Writing is not the same thing as speaking and/or presenting. What this all boils down to is learning about a topic, figuring out what makes it interesting to you, supporting those thoughts with stories and anecdotes, and then practicing it enough so that you are comfortable to present those ideas in public.

http://ckwrites.info/1g5j7xp

Content

Would you like to make it easier for attendees to interact at your conference and events?

With information accessible 24/7 online, there is an increasing amount of data that suggests that networking is replacing content as the primary reason to attend events.

There’s even a word for it, Connexity which is a mash-up of two of the things that attendees value most – Connection and Community.

A new study, reports on the results of a test conducted by a team of scientists who wanted to improve collaboration at a scientific conference.

The team wrote a networking algorithm to create introductions, using a speed-dating format. They started by sorting for attendees with different skill sets, then added other parameters like junior/senior. (There is a link to the algorithm.)

The idea would be easy to blend into registration (to collect pairing data) and then into the event app to facilitate the meeting process. Add a location tool and you’d have something very slick.

Of the 24 delegates who commented in the post-meeting questionnaire, 21 (87.5%) were very enthusiastic and complimentary, and 12 mentioned that potential new collaborations were emerging from discussions at the meeting.

No, it’s not much of a sample. Still I think that this approach promises to be a game changer.

http://ckwrites.info/1oldEHi

The Big AHA!

Do you like cameras, model trains or stories about the two?

Sony has a cool “story” campaign from Wieden+Kennedy for their new QX100 camera that takes place on the largest model train set you have ever imagined.

Here’s the write up from Out To Launch – take the time to look at the videos, especially Separate Together.

Last month, Sony Electronics launched “Join Together,” a 90-second spot that celebrated artists and engineers working together to create exemplary products. The follow-up to this ad is “Separate Together,” a four-minute documentary you have to see to believe. Part of the “Be Moved” brand campaign, the video brings together Bruce Zaccagnino, the creator of the world’s largest model railroad at Northlandz in Flemington, N.J., and Matt Albanese, a photographer who specializes in miniatures.

The film takes place inside the 52,000-square-foot exhibit space. Seeing it in full scale is amazing, with its tiny towns, papier-mâché mountains that are three stories high, and hundreds of toy trains snaking through tunnels and past mountains. When Albanese visits with his Sony QX100, magic happens. The camera can fit into tight spaces, so many of the views came when the camera was mounted to a flatbed car and attached to a moving train.

The film also lives at an experience site — www.Separate–Together.com — and yes, the dashes should be there!

Quite cool if you are a train or photo geek.

http://ckwrites.info/MJzmZt

Metrics & ROI

Need to know more about #selfie?

Coming hot on the heels of the Oxford Dictionary making “selfie” their Word Of The Year For 2013, (as previously reported in The Jolt!); and the Oscar-winning selfie that took down Twitter, you might  be more interested than you were last week.

#Philoselfie: Science behind selfie-expression is from Brian Solis, a noted market researcher with The Altimeter Group. According to Solis there are almost 90 million Instagram photos with a #selfie hashtag or a derivative there of.

Selfiecity.net is a research project that studies selfie data from Bangkok, Berlin, Moscow, New York, and Sao Paulo. (No idea why.)

  • The project investigates selfies using a mix of theoretic, artistic and quantitative methods.
  • We present our findings about the demographics of people taking selfies, their poses and expressions.

The team has created metrics to compare selfie preferences by gender, mood, head angle, glasses on or off and more. It’s a fascinating website and a great example of developing metrics that are relevant to your interests.

Selfiecity combines Findings about the demographics of people taking selfies and their poses and expressions; a number of media visualizations (imageplots) which assemble thousands of photos to reveal the interesting patterns; and an innovative interactive application  which allows visitors to explore the whole set of 3200 photos, sorting and filtering it to find new patterns.

http://ckwrites.info/1coV2GE

Marketing 501

Curious which brands owned the Oscars with real-time content?

Continuing on our #selfie theme we immediately come to the #selfie that broke Twitter – the Samsung snap of Ellen and her friends which has been retweeted 3 million+ times by now (2.6 million during the broadcast – who knows how many times around the water cooler since then.) So answers one and two, Ellen and Twitter, or Twitter and Ellen.

But there was also a group of companies who had teams at the ready seeking their very own “Oreo moment” during the broadcast including.

  • Pantene
  • SmokeyBear.com
  • Di Giorno Pizza
  • Miller Lite
  • NASA – my favorite with a tweet from the Space Station congratulating the Gravity winners.

Interesting to see how this is advancing – lots of clues for event and experience marketers. David Meerman Scott has an interesting post, Real-Time At The Oscars.

Real-time is now a part of every business. Live broadcasts like the Academy Awards and the Super Bowl bring people together. But it’s no longer a passive one way watching of television. Instead we share our thoughts via social networks.

Speeches, corporate events, and conferences include a real-time back channel where people discuss what’s happening on stage. Presenters can participate too. (Ed Note – story coming next week.)

We react instantly to the news. If you have a take on what’s going down, you can showcase your expertise at the precise moment the world is looking for it. Newsjacking (Ed Note – which the “Oreo moment” epitomized) is the art of injecting your ideas into a breaking news story.

For salespeople, real-time is critical. Today buyers are in charge. The idea of mystery in the sales process is over. We research someone online before agreeing to a first date—is he a creep? We fire up LinkedIn an hour before an initial business meeting—does she have anyone I know in her network?

We’re in a new world. It’s real-time. But you know that. Not because I say it a lot but because you’re living the new world every day.

http://ckwrites.info/1disjRT

If you haven’t subscribed to The Jolt! from ckwrites please do. Just click here – easy, peasy and done.

And please be sure to bookmark ck Curates – http://curate.ckwrites.com – you never know when you’ll need an alternative activity to the one you are not particularly engaged in.

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