IMC 2007 on creating outstanding content
There was a lot of good discussion around the main topic of the IMC, creating outstanding content. At first semantics got in the way (why do people ask questions like define outstanding?) but once the panelists got down to it there was some pretty good discussions going on. The first of which was 2nd life.
2nd life was heavily criticized – the reasoning seemed to be that it’s too weird and that people hadn’t figured out their first life yet. It has more PR than users according to Ola Oredson of cloud nine. Jack Fairhill (Kwiqq) pointed out that 2nd life has yet to have a good measurement strategy behind it and therefore can’t be justified. I agree with Jack but I refuse to dismiss it as a medium. I have heard how second life has worked (in terms of dollar revenues) and with a little tweaking it could be tracked as well as any other rich media application. More of that is needed in order for social media phenomina like 2nd life to succeed. There was general disagreement about 2nd life among the panelists.
We heard that outstanding content is a personal experience. This sits well with me from an engagement and activation perspective. People read and act on stuff that they find personally interesting. I also liked Cordovans Russel Clark’s comment about an outstanding experience for a truck driver using a mobile device to logon to his company network while driving is completely different to a web surfer looking for a news article.
Management 2.0 was coined (an awful phrase!) – a term used to describe managers who are proactive towards bad comments in a commercial environment. Russel Clark of Cordovan gave an example describing how barbie shot themselves in the foot by reacting badly to negative feedback in blogs rather than being proactive and taking advantage of it.
I asked the question – how do you see mobile content developing? (would advertising models start to work in mobile websites or in mobile applications tied into the devices?) The general answer was that they didn’t know or it was too early to say. Ola Oredsson from Cloud nine gave the best answer in my opinion by saying that it would greatly depend on the user experience and that a phones user experience is different to that of the web. That I completely agree with this and for that reason I think mobile websites designed with great usability in mind and applications that make it easy to interact will take shape. How we measure the applications is a Mobile Web 3.0 issue which needs addressing and is something I’m already looking at.
Finally measuring social media was asked about and the linked post reflects my overall views on that. What do you think? Comments appreciated.
That’s a good recap! I must agree that Second Life is a ghost town. I personally got bored in less than five minutes. That, however, doesn’t mean that I think it should be dismissed. It has clearly created a lot of PR for some companies. I think it may some day be replaced by something that only needs a web browser to run and that has better (more up to date) graphics. I always thought it was funny that The Sims hasn’t been capitalized more online. Thoughts?