A very simple, but very odd / funny viral advert for small business (?) the Ryan Lee Chiropractic Center in Los Angeles, CA. It was made by Rhett & Link. Shows what is possible with a little imagination… 2,571,393 views so far, in 3 days online.
Good example of a small business video commercial – Ryan Lee Chiropractic Center in Los Angeles, CA
Watch the video here:
I’m using Smartphone penetration as an indication of technological advancement… so be warned, it’s just an indication…
Source: TomiAhonen Consulting Analysis from Mary Meeker & Informa data, and UN population statistics, April 2013.
“Smartphone Penetrations in countries that have over 6 million smartphones in use:
COUNTRY . . . POPULATION . . . SMARTPHONES . . . SMARTPHONES PER CAPITA
Hong Kong . . . . . 7 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85%
(Note: Singapore and Macau track very close to Hong Kong)
Sweden . . . . . . . 9 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85%
(Note: Finland, Norway, Denmark and Iceland track very close to Sweden)
Australia . . . . . 22 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 72%
(Note: New Zealand tracks very close to Australia)
South Korea . . 48 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66%
Japan . . . . . . . 126 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 78 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62%
UK. . . . . . . . . . . 62 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56%
(Note: Ireland tracks very close to UK)
Netherlands . . . 17 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54%
(Note: Switzerland and Austria usually track hear Netherlands)
USA . . . . . . . . 320 . . . . . . . . . . . . . 172 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54%
Saudi Arabia . . 28 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53%
(Note: UAE, Kuwait, Bahrain and Qatar track usually well ahead of Saudi Arabia)
Canada . . . . . . 34 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44%
France . . . . . . . 63 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41%
Malaysia . . . . . 29 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41%
Spain . . . . . . . . 46 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39%
Italy . . . . . . . . . 61 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31%
Taiwan . . . . . . . 23 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30%
Germany . . . . . . 82 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30%
Brazil . . . . . . . . 201 . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27%
Argentina . . . . . . 42 . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26%
Poland . . . . . . . . 38 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23%
South Africa. . . . 52 . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21%
Thailand . . . . . . . 71 . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20%
China . . . . . . . 1,482 . . . . . . . . . . . . 270 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18%
Turkey . . . . . . . . 75 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17%
Philippines . . . . . 96 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16%
Russia . . . . . . . . 147 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15%
Mexico . . . . . . . 117 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13%
Indonesia . . . . . 247 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11%
Egypt . . . . . . . . . 84 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8%
India . . . . . . . 1,261 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3%
Source: TomiAhonen Consulting Analysis from Mary Meeker & Informa data, and UN population statistics, April 2013
This data may be freely shared
So when we add the ‘usual suspect’ smaller countries like Singapore, Finland, New Zealand, Switzerland etc, we get 22 countries already where smartphone penetration rate is past 50% per capita. And by now, April of 2013, we have just about 10 countries where there is a smartphone for three quarters of the population – Hong Kong, Macau, Singapore, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Norway, Iceland, Australia and New Zealand.
Previously (but not verified by these Mary Meeker numbers) we also heard that the UAE had passed 75% smartphone penetration by early 2012, so we should also have Bahrain, Kuwait and Qatar with more than 75% smarpthone penetration, so very likely the count is 14 (mostly small, and obviously very affluent) countries.”
Five reasons why the Evian baby videos are so popular, below. The new video baby & me has received more than 20 million views in four days.
baby&me / the new evian film – YouTube.
1) Characters: Multi-cultural cute babies and attractive adults
2) Catchy music – rhythm
3) Humour of incongruity. “Look at those babies doing adult dancing”
4) Brevity of the edit. It’s quick and short.
5) The concept – it’s a moment of magic. Elements all contribute. And no spoken words are required to understand the story – so barriers to enjoyment are low.
Also important: Branding is non-intrusive, so there’s no embarrassment about sharing this video.
I heard David Hepworth talk about this model a few years ago. Will work best for “prestige publishers” and strong communities. But content has to be strictly moderated…
“We had a 15, 20-page deck to raise some more money, and there was a diagram at the top [of a page] that said ‘the new newsroom,’” DVorkin said. “Wherever I went, people ripped that page out, folded it up, and put it in their jacket pocket.”
Which lead to a thought: What if the True/Slant model could be applied to a big brand? What if a media property could rely on un-or low-paid contributors* and embrace the Web? ”Maybe that’s our destiny here,” DVorkin said.
And it was. True/Slant was acquired by Forbes not long after DVorkin sought to raise another round of funding, and was then incorporated, at least in spirit, into Forbes. This contributor platform, which allows those previously mentioned “experts” to publish to the Forbes website, now allows 1,300 non-staff writers to post for Forbes.com, DVorkin said.
via How Lewis DVorkin’s True/Slant transformed Forbes into a publishing machine.
A quote from Cory Doctorow about simplicity on the web:
“Once your work gets into the right hands, there needs to be an easy way to consummate the relationship. A friend who runs a small press recently wrote to me to ask if I thought he should release his next book as a Creative Commons free download in advance of the publication, in order to drum up some publicity before the book went on sale.I explained that I thought this would be a really bad idea. Internet users have short attention spans. The moment of consummation — the moment when a reader discovers your book online, starts to read it, and thinks, huh, I should buy a copy of this book — is very brief. Thats because "I should buy a copy of this book" is inevitably followed by, "Woah, a youtube of a man putting a lemon in his nose!" and the moment, as they say, is gone.I know this for a fact. I review a lot of books on Boing Boing, and whenever I do, I link to the Amazon page for the book, using my "affiliate ID" in the URL. If you follow one of those links and buy the book, I get a commission — about eight percent. I can use Amazons reporting tool to tell exactly how many people click on my links, and how many of them shell out money for the book, and heres the thing: when I link to a book thats out soon, available now for pre-order, I reliably get less than ten percent of the purchases I get when I link to books that are available for sale now. Nine out of ten Boing Boing readers who buy books based on my reviews dont want to pre-order a title and wait for it to show up later.
The net is an unending NOW of moments and distractions and wonderments and puzzlements and rages. Asking someone riding its currents to undertake some kind of complex dance before she can hand you her money is a losing proposition. User-interface designers speak of how every additional click between thought and deed lops a huge number of seeds out of the running for germination.“
via Locus Online Features: Cory Doctorow: Think Like a Dandelion.
BoingBoing reminded us of the dandelion idea in this post about Neil Gaiman’s talk on the future of publishing. Mr Gaiman talks about failing more etc – which is such a difficult idea for many large companies:
“When the rules are gone you can make up your own rules. You can fail, you can fail more interestingly, you can try things, and you can succeed in ways nobody would have thought of, because you’re pushing through a door marked no entrance, you’re walking in through it. You can do all of that stuff but you just have to become a dandelion, be wiling for things to fail, throw things out there, try things, and see what sticks. That was the thrust of my speech,” said the author.
http://boingboing.net/2013/04/22/gaiman-on-the-future-of-publis.html
BuzzFeed’s popular take on hard news reporting.
Lots of large pictures, animated .gifs, maps, content from social networks and few words…
“And while people ran for their lives…Many ran directly toward the danger.”
Source: abcnews.go.com
via The Epic, Crazy, Horrifying, Ongoing Story Of The Boston Marathon Bombers.
Evidence that viral content can actually convert site users into customers is scarce, partly because virality is so difficult to generate. For most businesses, remembering to “help not sell” is usually a more productive path.
Anyway… Buzzfeed are attempting to manufacture virals for their customers. Virgin say it gets results:
“We have the bait, now we have to bring them into the Virgin Mobile family,” Faris told the meeting. He sometimes likens his BuzzFeed posts to the joke that opens a sales pitch: Maybe it will lead to a “like” on Facebook, and then, using cookies to track the reader, Virgin will deploy display ads on other sites the reader visits. Faris brought up a recent video tied to Valentine’s Day, urging consumers to “break up with their carrier.”
“We got like a 95 percent spike in sales that day,” he reported.
via Does Buzzfeed Know the Secret? — New York Magazine.
See also:
“In other words, Facebook has found that people really are more likely to share all of their unhappy thoughts when given the formal option, even though, technically, status updates have offered free speech all along. That’s a powerful finding, and it’s why the company sees the status update, combined with the emoji-esque tag, as a one-two punch of a more expressive, context-aware Facebook”.
via Facebook Opens The Door To Dislikes, With Emoticons | Co.Design: business + innovation + design.
A slide from Angel Anderson’s Slideshare deck
A few months ago I was thinking aloud about e-cards and how they still have not replaced paper greeting cards in my affections:
Perhaps when it comes to personal messages, a little effort is appreciated? We need the web to limit us, sometimes.
— Ciarán Ryan (@ciaranryan) January 24, 2013
Paper cards require effort, so indicate care & attention to receiver. E-cards are currently too easy… require effort & more will be sent?
— Ciarán Ryan (@ciaranryan) January 24, 2013
Today I was reminded of my Tweets by stumbling across Angel Anderson’s Slideshare deck, in which she writes about Facebook’s frictionless sharing. As she points out:
“Without friction, sharing loses its meaning”
Recently, Charlie Watts from the Rolling Stones has been talking about the changes in the music industry, and treasuring music:
“I’d swap things: a cymbal for a certain record … Then I’d go to Ray’s Jazz Shop. That’s when it was in New Oxford Street, in the basement of Collet’s. God bless him! He was green, he was never allowed to see daylight, they used to keep him in the cellar. And then I’d sell the record and go and buy the cymbal back.”
…
“When I was what you’d call a young musician, jazz was very fashionable. It was very hip to know there was a new Miles Davis album out. Now no one knows what records come out. Especially me! Because of this thing [gestures at my iPhone recording the interview, with the inference that it is somehow the devil's work] … But in those days … an album: you kept it, you treasured it.”
Perhaps, what I am saying is this:
Getting others to share your content is getting easier. It’s becoming widespread behaviour.
But getting people to value your content, perhaps even to value it enough that it influences their behaviour is as difficult as it has ever been.
One way of differentiating your content is: Cost. The expression of these costs could be the hook you are looking for.
See also
Why people share content
Logged-in readers can annotate images on the Kotaku website
“If you go to a post on Kotaku and see a giant image up top (that’s 970×546, if you’re measuring) click on it. See what happens? You can comment on that part of the image. Try it. Here’s an example using a Battlefield 4 image.
I think this is going to change the way we look at and talk about new screenshots. I look forward to you folks calling out the fakery in bullshots and highlighting the cool parts of the better images.”
via Welcome To The New Kotaku: Better Graphics, More Interactive, Same Low Price..