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Nielsen's 2010 Internet & Technology Report was released in Australia yesterday and, surprise surprise, it finds we are spending ever more time online.

 

The study found internet usage has risen by nearly 10 per cent over the past twelve months; users are now typically spending 17.6 hours online every week.

 

This is a whopping 28.5 per cent increase on 2007 usage levels and a 9 per cent increase on 2008 levels. Again, unsurprisingly, 16 to 29 year olds are the heaviest users, spending an average 22 hours online every week, while 30 to 49 year olds are averaging around 18.2 hours.

 

Those over 50 - whom you might think are too busy either tinkering with their ham-radios or scrawling angry letters-to-the-editor on their Smith Corona typewriters to spend time 'internetting' - are spending a weekly average of 15.5 hours online, almost as much time as they spend watching Eastenders and Antiques Roadshow on television.

 

Males are spending more time online than females and users based in major cities  are spending more time online than their counterparts in regional areas. The study  - which gathered 2371 responses from internet users and non-users through both online surveys and telephone hook-ups - found too that in major centres, the internet is now equal with television as the preferred outlet through which to source news and information.

 

What is interesting about the report is that it finds that, rather than concentrating on just one form of media (ie. television, radio, internet) at a time, people of all ages are increasingly multi-tasking with various media at the same time.

It's a bit like a McDonalds ad currently airing here in Australia. In keeping with the conglomerate's successful 'Love...' campaign, a smartly-dressed Gen-Y clown happily reads the paper, listens to his I-Pod and surfs the web, somehow still managing to wolf down an artery-clogging bacon, sausage and egg McMuffin in the process. 'Love multitasking (and heart disease, it would appear)' the ad declares; yumbo.

Anyway, I digress. The Nielsen study found 49 per cent of internet users multitask the internet and television at the same time, while 39 per cent do the same with internet and the radio. It's common now for live television shows (like the ABC's 'Q&A' current affairs program, for example) to encourage viewers to actively engage with guests via Twitter. Other shows, meanwhile, direct viewers to websites where additional content is available to download for a limited time.

The release of the I-Phone, Blackberry and other smart phone devices means we all now have the ability to go online - and stay online - just about anywhere. The daily commute to work on the bus or train once saw people awkwardly negotiate their broadsheet newspapers with the throng of other passengers doing the same. That has now given way (what's a broadsheet anyway? I hear you ask) to a sea of white earphones connected to internet-capable phones, I-Pods and other similar devices, at which most of us stare blankly.

It's interesting though - and reassuring - to note older generations are increasingly embracing new technology, as evidenced in the Nielson report. The days of shopping for 45s and LPs may be over, but baby boomers appear to have little trouble downloading their favourite music.

Apple I-Tunes celebrated its 10 billionth song being downloaded last week. Notably, the buyer was NOT some youngster hunting down the latest appalling, mass-produced and marketed dross by the likes of Ke$ha. Oh no, it was 71-year old country music fan Louie Sulcer from Woodstock Georgia, who bought Johnny Cash's 'Guess Things Happen That Way', and won $10,000 worth of free music on I-Tunes for his effort.

I don't know what I'd download with all that I-Tunes cash but, in a rather feeble attempt to end this blog rant cleverly, I'd include both Bob Dylan's 'The Times They Are a-Changin' (because they have) or Handsome Boy Modelling School's 'The World's Gone Mad' (which it has also). Aaah-Ha! Now, time for a cup of tea.....

 

When I was 17, I worked in the Junior's department at Penney's. We were given the incentive of getting a $1 bonus for every catalog we sold to customers.  It was pretty motivating given the $5-7 extra I could earn each night would go a long way on coffee at Denny's later that evening.

Given the fact that I still have a warm place in my heart for JCPenney catalogs, I was very sad to read today that they will no longer be offered.  However, honestly, I'm incredibly surprised they've lasted this long.  I'm imagining an elderly layout designer, working in the same spot in the office since the 70s.  He decided to retire, and therefore, the catalog was laid to rest.  I'm sure that's not the case, but it's a cute little dream. 

Here's the article on designrelated.com where I discovered this news item. 

Happy New Year!

When I was at university, my all time favourite subject was Consumer Behaviour.I loved learning about the relationship between organizations, their brands and their customers.In those days though, most marketing messages were delivered via a one-way street - broadcast from company to consumer.

Today, the dynamic growth of digital channels, and in particular social media, has truly shifted the communication paradigm. Marketing as a conversation has arrived!

There's no better example of this than the recent case of Vegemite iSnack 2.0. I'm sure there isn't anyone in Australia that is unaware of this saga but for our friends elsewhere I'll give you a quick overview:

Vegemite (http://www.vegemite.com.au) is an iconic breakfast spread that has been enjoyed by Aussies since 1922.They recently decided on a brand extension, adding a Vegemite and cheese spread.As was the case when they named the original product all those years ago, they decided to choose the name of the new product through a competition. iSnack 2.0 was the winning name but it didn't resonate well with the public. (http://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/1101797/Backlash-kills-off-iSnack-2.0)

The new name was revealed last month during the Football (AFL) Grand final.I was enjoying the game but also had an eye on Twitter and saw an avalanche of protests appear before my very eyes. Not long after the social media uproar commenced, traditional media jumped on the bandwagon and for days the naming of this product was headline news.

This story got me thinking about a case study we had looked at in class years before. It was the Cola Wars and Coca Cola's introduction of 'New Coke' in April 1985.Coca-Cola did the unthinkable and changed their secret formula.They too received an 'instant' backlash. Consumers wrote letters of complaints (Remember them? They got delivered by snail mail). They phoned the company and talk-back radio stations and wrote letters to newspapers. The outrage was enormous!

(http://www.thecoca-colacompany.com/heritage/cokelore_newcoke.html) (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Coke)

There are a lot of similarities in these two stories. One could argue that decisions were made without enough research and consultation with their customers. Anyway, both cases required a reversal of decisions made by the marketing and management teams.The difference in the stories is the speed of reaction:

- Time to change Coke back to its original formula = 3 months
- Time to change the name of Vegemite iSnack 2.0 = 3 days!

If you're a 21^st century marketer, engage in conversations with your customers! The powerbase has definitely shifted and consumers are speaking - are you listening?

PS - The new Vegemite product was renamed Vegemite Cheesybite. How was the name chosen? By an online poll :)

Return On Investment (or ROI) when it comes to social media isn't easy to measure.  How many consumers used the coupon you tweeted last week?  Sure, the company's Facebook page looks neat, but what kind of dollars is it bringing the business?  Thankfully, Olivier Blanchard, a Principal at BrandBuilder Marketing, created this humorous little presentation to go over the basics of measuring ROI.

Ah, '70s sci-fi never looked so groovy....

My VOIP provider at home sent me a letter (yes, the old fashioned kind that comes in the mail) informing me my service will be discontinued this fall and that I need to find a new provider.

This is the second time I've chosen a provider that ultimately goes out of business. (No, I'm not a betting woman. This is one example of why.)

Interestingly, both times I've searched for a provider, I've looked at websites where customers rate the various services and chosen highly rated providers. The first time, my provider started strong and then their service quality collapsed as their business imploded; this time, I've had no complaints but the company's decided to discontinue the offering.

My real question has nothing to do with Voice Over IP, really, because despite this post, that's a topic I prefer not to think about:

1) What motivates a person to do those reviews? Do really bad experiences motivate MORE than really good ones?

2) How come I've been wrong twice?

You tell me.

In a previous post I talked about the characteristics of Viral Marketing. You may recall there were 6 R's for any marketing campaign to be successful - Replication, Reach, Regular audience, Resilience, Reliance and Response.

This meant that as a company indulging in Viral marketing one has to have an idea which spreads far and wide, to people who really want to know and get excited about it. It has to be genuine and open to comments and feedback. The Viral marketing idea being called the "seed".

How does one seed the viral marketing idea? And where does one go to seed it? If we look at the evolution of the net it took the following paths ...

1) Long ago there was the concept of e-mail which enabled users of a particular organisation to write into each other.

2) Then we got into world wide web where hotmail or yahoo enabled conversations between people who did not belong to the same organisation but could register with these platforms and exchange information. Therein evolved "User Groups".

3)Then came along Google which revolutionised the web by providing large storage space and exchange of pictoral content as an option. Orkut became an instant rage with chats and profiles dominating mailing ... oh so passé!

4) Orkut has been replaced by our addiction to our Facebook, Linkedin and YouTube in that for everything one wants to do one instinctively reaches to these platforms. Statistics show that Facebook is almost as big as Google in page views. YouTube is double in page views. Facebook adds 100,000 to 250,000 new viewers each day. There we have the audience who will hear, listen and respond. There followed the usual players in Twitter, or Digg for creating your own video.

The above are the known ones. Squidoo is another great option. Some marketers swear by it for driving in the traffic. HubPages is a good option too.

My next posting will be about Web 2.0 and using social marketing as a medium for winning business. Stay tuned ...

Image courtesy of: Brajeshwar

Ms. Pistachio was the first to alert me, via Twitter, natch, that Skittles had gone all Social Media on us. Sure as shootin', the current (March 2, 2009) Skittles.com is a mash-up of social media sites where the name of the colorful and intoxicatingly concentrated jelly-bean-oidal confection appears.

Of course, Skittles, with the aid of Agency.com, are following in the footsteps of Modernista!, who took their own website in this direction last year. Still, the fact that a consumer brand has emulated a trendy design shop has got everybody talking, including the ever articulate (and strikingly handsome) David Armano, who rightly predicts, I believe, that we'll see more of this, not less and goes on to link the Skittle move to the emergence of "sponsored conversations."

But what is this "this" that we're going to be seeing more of? I think it's something we could call "aleatoric" design which takes advantage of the fact that web pages, in the end, exist as a set of instructions to be executed by a browser, not a fixed arrangement of text and image (as in the print world). Since these instructions can be linked to dynamic sites themselves (Twitter, YouTube, Wikipedia, etc.), "design now becomes the quasi-symphonic arrangement of fluid elements that resist control or even predictability.

Given this tendency, wouldn't it be better for web designers to have a background in performance, choreography, or musical composition than graphic arts? Isn't it time we acknowledged that interactive design is NOT graphic design (or that the latter is an increasingly small and incidental component of the former)?

This post was written by Aquent's Alex "Anytime/Anywhere" Weaver. This is a picture of him.

As fluid and uncertain as it has become (thanks in part to companies shedding full-time employment opportunities faster than A-Rod is shedding fans), the career landscape isn't really a landscape anymore. Its more like a wormhole where traditional job search conventions go in and something entirely different emerges.

Some claim that we are now looking at a 24-hour workplace, but I think it goes beyond that. Thanks to the web, the workplace isn't even a real place anymore; it's been replaced by the nowhere-in-particular of cyberspace.

The question now is: How do you go about looking for a job in the anytime/anywhere world of work in which the internet is your office, a solid web presence your resume, and what you do (your specialization) matters more than where you do it (your geographic location)?

I'll tell you this: it's not easy. Where once you could focus the bulk of your networking attention on the city you call home, now you could potentially be working for a client in Kuala Lumpur on a project that needs to be delivered next day to Sao Paulo (their time), while your toast gets cold in Idaho. See? It's complicated!

We've been responding to this brave new wormhole by shifting around the way we work. Our agents are now focusing less on covering a specific geographical beat than they are on mastering a particular area of specialization. It's technically possible for a web agent in Seattle to find a web designer in Montreal to work for a client in Dallas, so why shouldn't we make exactly that happen?

Obviously [BLATANT SELF-PROMOTION WARNING!], one way to look for gigs (or talent, for that matter) in the anytime/anywhere world is to partner with an organization capable of being anywhere/anytime (I can recommend one if you're curious). But what I'm dying to know is, how are YOU doing it (without the aforementioned, nameless organization)? Have you been able to shift your mind and efforts successfully into the de-spatialized, temporally fluid workplace? Do you work in a certain specialty rather than a certain place? Does your client list span the globe while you, uh, butter your toast in Idaho?

To put it another way, do you now or have you ever worked for someone you have never met in person who lives in a place you've never visited? How did you make that happen? I gotta to know! Talk to me!

A couple weeks ago, Mr. Randall Rothenberg published a manifesto on interactive advertising creativity, which I missed at the time but discovered thanks to a post by Alan Wolk on whether or not creativity still matters.

Mr. Rothenberg's lengthy (by web standards - it took me minutes to read rather than seconds) manifesto is a well-written, informed, and impassioned defense of inspired creativity as the heart and soul of advertising, as that which not only gives it value but, more importantly makes it meaningful to the lives of real human beings. Against the rising tide of commoditization, he says, "We must stop acting as if we're selling schmattes, and start acting like the makers of magic that the best of us are -- and always have been."

Aside from pointing out that Rothenberg explicitly confirms my assertion that interactive design is a team sport - "There are several new skill sets creative agencies today must possess to attract, engage, and influence consumers -- Flash video development, software design, information architecture, animation, CRM, iPhone app design, and ActionScript development among them -- and no one individual will have expertise in all" - I would like to highlight one other critical point he makes: Great advertising is not aimed primarily at consumers; it's true "target audience" are the employees of the company that it promotes:

"This is perhaps the most important reason advertising creativity matters. It inspires the marketer. It encourages the sales force. It provides them, and all the other constituencies in and around the company and the brand, the faith that they will be able to sell the product in to the retailer, close the sales on the dealer's lot, win new commissions, and better their own lives. Great advertising is their rallying cry, the flag they march under. The mouseclick must be matched by their heartbeat."

Forget about the customer for a second. Does your creative work actually inspire your colleagues?

A recent survey we conducted with the American Marketing Association showed that, even though most marketers are turning to online marketing for salvation in these dark times, they are finding themselves in a bind because they don't want to outsource these efforts but they don't necessarily have the in-house expertise required to get it done. Turns out that, although online marketing was a stated priority for many in 2008, few were able to actually make the online marketing hires they'd planned earlier in the year.

Lesson 1: Unfettered demand for online marketing translates into unflagging demand for interactive designers and developers.

The cultural revolution unleashed by web technology is ongoing and has produced an increasingly refined level of specialization. Whereas ten years ago we primarily distinguished between creative, front-end designers on the one hand and technically-oriented back-end coder/programmers on the other, today we see a proliferation of web-specific roles ranging from Flash gurus to user experience managers to web analytics wizards and beyond.

In addition to this morphing, expansion, and multiplication of web roles, we've witnessed an intense transformation of the way web work happens. The nature of the technology allows for teams to function without regard to geographical location and the fact that the web is always "on" means that web projects know no temporal limitations; they can and sometimes must be executed at any time, day or night.

Lesson 2: Innovation on the web isn't just about what people do, it's about where and when they do it.

The demand for interactive talent obviously means a wealth of opportunities for web professionals whether their focus is design, development, or marketing. The innovations brought about by the web mean that companies who hire web professionals have an amazing variety of options when it comes to engaging the people they need. The fact that the web and what people do with it continues to grow and change means that no one can predict exactly what new opportunities it will create in the future. However, it is undeniable that understanding these opportunities and their implications will mean the difference between success and failure for businesses and professionals alike.

Lesson 3: To take advantage of new opportunities, you need to have a grasp of the possibilities engendered by technical innovation as well as the limitations imposed by the demands of the marketplace.

On that note, if you want to get a better handle on the opportunities offered or precluded by the current interactive talent market, you ought to tune in to this webcast that Aquent is putting on in conjunction with Monster: Hiring Interactive Talent in the New World of Work .

Tell 'em, Matt sent you.