Cx3: Royal change management

Yesterday, there was the royal wedding between Prince William and Kate Middleton. The day was declared a bank holiday in the UK, we were glued to the television and there were thousands of very British street parties up and down the country...hurrah for the happy couple!

However yesterday, the royal wedding also re-positioned the popular 'William and Kate' brand past a superficial excuse to have a party. The new 'Duke and Duchess of Cambridge' brand, for a day, lead the nation (and the world) with values of awareness, relevance, accessibility and acceptance that will be influential in shaping the future monarchy in the United Kingdom.

It was an uncompromising marriage meme connecting tradition with modernity, regal with common, youth with wisdom, Smiths with Beckhams, Grace Kelly glamour with fascinator fad, respectful etiquette with carefree abandonment, serious with fun, old with new...I could go on with the dichotomies, but the message is clear.

Accessibility to the royal couple's wedding day embraced today's technology. Live streaming records were broken as people around the world watched the wedding over the internet, topping 300,000 concurrent users on Livestream.

Social amplification of the event dominated trends on Twitter, Facebook and Google. 65% of the conversation came from the USA and 20% from the UK.

Healthy social commentary including the good (that McQueen dress by Sarah Burton); the bad (Princess Beatrice's ridiculous Royal Wedding hat - OMG); and the unexpected - the matron of honor upstaging the bride (the earthy 'Pippa Middleton Ass Appreciation Society' on Facebook), says it all.

The official royal wedding photographs have been released on Flickr.

So, to a truely global, social and accessible Duke and Duchess of Cambridge - royal change management facilitators, I raise a glass.

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Cx3: Cadbury's spots v stripes

Cadbury's spots v stripes is my favourite advert on TV at the moment and is part of the wider integrated campaign tying in the reach of broadcast media with incentivised online data capture, game play and viral social media.

Which side will you join? Go on, give it a glass and a half and take a side - play the Cadbury's spots v stripes game.





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Cx3: Big Brother's social media future

As an unashamed Big Brother fan (I indulge in its banality), and knowing for a while that Endomol's contract with Channel 4 was due to end in 2010 the recent spin targeted at Joe Public raising the prominance of a ratings slump was an amusing move in managing expectations.

I was interested to read Wildonion's insider thoughts on the subject and I totally concur with the opportunities mentioned that Endemol has for social network affiliation.

As Wildonion says "It [Big Brother] has a young audience. That audience don’t really watch too much TV", therefore, target the channels that they do access - does Endemol even need a traditional TV broadcaster to facilitate this? What we see today are managed bite-sized chunks of happenings in the house of what a Channel 4 producer wants a TV audience to see that supposedly makes good television and is an attempt to sustain TV viewing figures - but for what audience?

Big Brother started as a social experiment - a group of people cut off from the outside world and how they behaved over a period of time. As we all know, the programme became a perceived avenue for celebrity stardom. However, two interesting things happened this year that should not be overlooked:

- Firstly, the outside world came into the house for the first time in the form of a few 'celebrity gossip magazines', within which housemates were featured - their reactions were televised and it was a refreshing flashback to the original social experiment ethos of the first series.
- Secondly, conversations were encouraged by allowing housemates to discuss nominations.

In the future, why not give housemates ongoing access to social media whilst in the house so that they can view the conversations being said about them in the outside world - would this change an individual's behaviour in order to manage their own self's brand reputation? Housemates could engage with social media by recording their own diary-cam videos to upload to YouTube, they could write blog posts or interact with Twitter.

Ten year's after Big Brother started, social interactions have changed with the advances of social media. Therefore, it is these social media interactions that Big Brother needs to experiment upon again.

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Cx3: Iran's social media voice

The elections in Iran and the unfolding events in Tehran have demonstrated the growing power today’s social media vehicles have over traditional news reporting. Despite frequent attempts by the Iranian government to block ‘controversial’ communications (including the BBC website), it has been the blogs, the Twitter posts, and the video and picture uploads that have been the voice of Iranian citizens and the source of content for traditional media broadcasters.

On the back of the events in Iran, the debate has opened again on traditional broadcasters using social media as credible sources of information, in particular in the context of international news reporting:

- Broadcaster's acceptance of social media for international news reporting where areas may be inaccessible to journalists (e.g. governmental restrictions; geographical location; environmental barriers).
- The growth in mobile internet connectivity in remote locations enabling the two-way dissemination of information and greater reach of news content.
- The verification of information from more prominent ‘semi-professional’ journalistic sources, which require monitoring.

The BBC embraces the value of blogs and Twitter, and over the past week, BBC World actively called upon Iranian audiences to post links to videos, pictures and comments to a BBC email address, as their journalists were having difficulty accessing the streets of Tehran. Citizen-generated content was broadcast by the BBC, however, a ‘semi-professional journalist’ disclaimer distanced themselves from the content source.

There is recognition from traditional media broadcasters that social media has value in future news reporting and the Iranian elections have concreted this, however, content verification and editorial control are still hurdles having to be jumped before true journalistic synergies will be realised.

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Ofcom communication report 2008

Ofcom's 2008 communication report covering the UK’s £51 billion communications industry was released this week. Its key finding was that people in the UK are spending more time using communications services than ever before – but paying less for them.

The Ofcom report covers broadcast, internet, mobile, landline and radio communication channels and shows that in 2007 we spent an average of 7 hours and 9 minutes a day using communications services - up by 6 minutes from 2002.

The UK's mobile and internet usage increased by the greatest amount. Between 2002 and 2007 the time spent talking and texting on mobiles doubled, up from 5 minutes to 10 minutes each day. Meanwhile, time spent on PCs and lap-tops grew fourfold between 2002 and 2007 - from 6 minutes to 24 minutes per person every day.

Using more, paying less
Despite the growth in communication channel usage and take-up, consumers are paying less with overall average household spend on communications services falling 1.6% to £93.63 a month in 2007, a saving of £1.53 on the average spend compared to 2006, and since 2004, a saving of £4.31 (4.4%). There are three main reasons behind the fall in the price of communications services:

Discounts from bundles:
Consumers are increasingly buying bundles of communications services - paying one fee for multiple services, which is generally cheaper than buying individual services from different providers. The number of households buying bundles of three or more services – for example landline, broadband and pay-TV – has almost doubled up from 18% in 2006 to 32% by March 2008.

Lower prices for broadband:
The average household spend on internet and broadband services fell from £9.87 in 2006 to £9.45 in 2007.

Bargain hunting:
An increasing proportion of consumers are switching between providers in order to get the best deal. By March 2008, 27% had switched internet provider at least once; 37% had switched landline provider and 41% had changed mobile provider.

Broadband at home and on the move
Take-up of broadband through a landline grew from 52 per cent of households to 58% in 12 months, mainly as a result of consumers upgrading from dial-up access to always-on broadband. Increased sales of laptop dongles enabling internet access via a mobile network nearly doubled from 69,000 to 133,000 a month between February and June 2008. As a result, there were 511,000 new mobile broadband connections in the UK.

60% Growth in 3G mobile connections:
More than one in ten mobile phone users have accessed the internet on their mobile phone with the number of 3G mobile connections growing by 60% in 2007 to reach 12.5 million subscribers – an increase of 4.7 million in 12 months.

Online and on-demand
Whilst there has been a small increase in the number of minutes spent each day watching the TV (218 minutes in 2007, compared with 216 in 2006), there is an increased trend for consumers taking control of TV viewing. Viewers are watching programmes when they want and how they want, rather than just relying on the TV schedules.

Growth in online TV watching:
The proportion of people with an internet connection who are watching TV programmes online more than doubled from 8% to 17% in twelve months. The BBC iPlayer, which enables viewers to watch programmes up to a week after they were broadcast, delivered more than 700,000 daily video streams in May 2008.

Growth in online video and webcast viewing:
Nearly a third of internet users (32%) watched video clips and webcasts in 2007, compared to a fifth (21%) in 2006. The number of UK internet users who watched YouTube, reached 9 million in April this year, nearly 50 per cent more than a year ago.

IM preference over email for Generation Y:
Instant messaging is more popular than email amongst children with 62% of 12-15 year old sending an instant message, compared with 43% of them sending an email. Adults prefer to email – 80% of adults sent an email compared to 34% who used instant messaging.

Increase in online radio listening:
The number of people listening to radio via the internet has increased to 14.5 million by May 2008, up 21% from 12.0 million in November 2007.

Slowdown in VoIP usage:
The number of people using voice over internet protocol (VoIP) fell from 20% in 2006 to 14% in the first quarter of 2008.

Mobile telecoms
By the end of 2007, there were almost 74 million mobile connections serving a population of 60 million in the UK. This was an increase of 3.7 million connections since the end of 2006. The total number of mobile connections increased by 48% in the five years from 2002.

Mobile preference over landline:
Seven out of ten people with a mobile phone and a landline use their mobile to make calls, even when they are at home. One in ten people with a landline at home said that they never use it to make calls.

UK text messaging addiction:
In the UK, nearly 60 billion text messages were sent in 2007 - an increase of 36% since 2006 and up by 234% since 2002 when 17 billion texts were sent. The average mobile phone user sent 67 texts per month from each mobile compared to 53 texts per month in 2006.

Generation Y gender channel preferences:
The majority of children have access to the internet and most have a mobile phone but there is a gender preference. Boys aged 8-11 are twice as likely to use the internet every day compared to girls of the same age (45% compared to 22%). Meanwhile girls aged 12-15 are more likely to use a mobile phone than boys of the same age (74% compared to 65%).

Generation Y mobile phone dependency:
When asked which media activity would be missed the most, 42% of these teenagers said they would miss their mobile most. Watching TV came next at 20%.

Television and Radio
Digital television and radio penetration continued and by July 2008, nearly 9 out of 10 households had digital television (87.2%) compared to 7 out of 10 twelve months ago. By March 2008, 7 million households (27%) had a DAB radio set, up from 17% on last year.

Increase in DVR penetration:
More consumers are now able to choose when to watch, pause and rewind live TV. At the end of 2007 nearly 6 million households (23%) had a Digital Video Recorder (DVR) up by 53% in a year.

Broadcast advertising reach affected by DVR consumer behaviour:
The vast majority of people (88%) said that, when they use their DVRs, they use them to fast forward through advertisements.

HD television becoming the standard:
By March of this year, nearly 80% of all TV sets sold in the UK were High-Definition (HD) ready, up from 50 per cent in twelve months. The number of HD subscriptions more than doubled to reach 829,000 over the same period.

Television most-missed media channel overall:
More than half of consumers (52%) said watching TV would be the media activity missed the most, up from 44% in 2005. The next highest ‘most-missed’ activity would be using a mobile phone at 13%, up from 10% in 2005.

Advertising
Internet advertising spend greater than broadcast:
Online advertising spend is up by almost 40% year-on-year reaching £2.8 billion in 2007. For the first time, more money was spent on internet advertising than the combined advertising spending on ITV1, Channel 4, S4C and five (£2.4 billion).

Paid-for search advertising spend domination:
Paid-for search advertising spend was up 39% during 2007 at £1.6 billion. Classified advertising saw the largest increase in 2007 – up 54% to £600 million while display advertising grew by 29% in 2007 accounting for a further £600 million of advertising spend.

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BBC Sport's Olympic map twitters for Gold

The BBC is continuing to embrace its approach to integrated broadcast/online communication channels by extending the reach of its news coverage of this year's Olympic Games in Beijing - and this time, Twitter enters the arena.

Ongoing mobile updates via Twitter provides journalists with a restriction-free channel to communicate an up-to-the-minute personal style of reporting from the ground. BBC sports journalist Tom Fordyce writes:

"15 minutes and counting. The stadium floor is now packed with drummers, all crouching in the dark. We're almost there..."

"It's like being at some sort of mystical rave. The scale of it is almost frightening. Although the fireworks are tremendous."

"In the 'Cube waiting for our first sighting of the Phelpmeister. What a pool. Mind you, when you're used to Putney Leisure Centre..."

"Just spotted former 100m Olympic champion Maurice Greene watching the swimming at the Cube."

"Now at the fencing. Talk about gladitorial - it's riveting, even though the finer points are a touch over my head. En guarde!"

This Twittering is supported by BBC Sport's interactive Olympic map that not only geographically pinpoints the mobile Twitter updates, but also provides links to BBC blog updates and information on venues and Beijing landmarks.

A gold medal to the BBC for championing Twitter.

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User-centric web design: my digital wellies gather no mud

Purists would say that to experience Glastonbury is to experience the mud; the camping; the endless queue for the portaloo (as well as the music). However, for music lovers who aren't so 'pure', the BBC's Glastonbury site and BBC three live arena allow audiences to choose how they 'experience' the festival - wellie dread is no more (even diamond studded pairs branded Bassey).

The BBC continues to embrace video integration into their website. The success of the BBC's i-player video-on-demand service demonstrates closer synergies between online and broadcast communications with both channels working seamlessly together, enabling audiences to choose what they watch, at what time, and via their channel of choice.

The BBC's user-centric approach to web development is also demonstrated with their customisable homepage. As a content-rich site, the BBC website attracts audiences who extract what they need from the site, when they want it. By embracing a customisable homepage, the BBC website survives by handing power to the user enabling them to select how they effectively and efficiently reach that relevant content.

This is another example of the pull approach to online communication development that assists in garnering valuable audience loyalty...muddy wellies are a thing of the past.