In times of economic uncertainty, having your finger on the consumer pulse becomes even more important to ensure you’ll be making/selling/marketing the products and services consumers will be buying in the future.

Step up The Future Laboratory which has extended their popular Future Reports and Trend Briefings into a one-stop portal called the LifeStyle:News:Global network.

LSNglobal.com is  your virtual team reporting back on whats hot and happening across a range of  sectors all over the world. Reports can cover anything from new consumer tribes (e.g. “Bleisure” seekers bluring the boundaries of business and leisure, demanding convergence from  mobile devices to  travel) to Parisian home living.

I joined the portal after participating as a speaker at one of their events on The Future of Social Media and am constantly sifting through it for inspiration. Membership is a good investment for businesses wanting to ensure they’re future-proofed, from my perspective particularly useful when it comes to the evershifting technology landscape.

I’d like to see the reports evolve to harness up-to-the-minute digital trend insights technology in the future.

Nothing sums up blogging like Gaping Void

Ok, so I don’t have any quantitative research or expert opinion to validate this statement but I’m declaring… The Personal Blog is Back.

Here’s why I’m thinking this:

Reason One: It seemed like some of the original bloggers were quiet for a bit while we media types were navel gazing about the zeitgeist and saying ” But whhhhyyyyyy do they blog? What’s their motivation? Defiiiine them. Raaaank them”. But it’s safe to come out now. Promise.

Reason Two: Twitter is not the new toy anymore

Reason Three: Less techy types warmed to the idea that writers of “weblog diary thingies” are not a bunch of socially inept saddos. Ask your mum if she knows what a blog is. (Or if she’s writing one)

Reason Four: I personally got a little bored opening my reader and seeing the same old search hungry “Top 10 tips …” being generated by some commercial blogs. I started looking for blogs I could enjoy and learnt more about what makes entertaining media by being entertained

So that’s it really. Of course personal blogs never went away. There’s probably no data to show a dip in posts etc. My gut just says it feels like we’ve been through a period of learning and now it’s like the school holidays and we can read & write for pleasure again.

Here’s some that I’m loving.

Gemma Cartwright: The first blogger I ever read. Now I’m privileged to be friends with her I love her own blog. Not least because leaving bitchy comments when she posts about her home decorating has provided a useful outlet  for frustration at my own living circumstances. Sorry Gem. I will try harder.

Good Hooking: Apparently I’m not alone in a misspent youth embroidering samplers and hand hooking rugs. Crafting is, like, so hot right now.

sizemore: Another favourite web person. When not being the perfect host and feeding me up with dinner after dinner of veggie goodness he’s blogging about meeting Harrison Ford and teaching me how to be cool.

Stuart Waterman:  A quick read helps provide me with witty and amusing popular culture anecdotes for sophisticated dinner parties (see above). Thanks Stuart.

Going Underground: Annie Mole, I really and truly do read your blog even though whenever you say to me “didn’t you see it on my blog?” I always seem a little vacant.

Rubinman: In a faraway Social Media training session… “OMG. I heard that some bloggers actually write blogs for their pets?” Yes. Funny, isn’t it. Oh and infinitely better than your latest press release.

Please tell me some of your favourites.

Vodafone's Live Guy

I’ve seen two really good campaign ideas recently around Treasure Hunts.

Find Me

• What is it?  Objects were hidden round London with clues to their location on blogs. Each object contained a letter which spelled out a question. The object locations were plotted, via map markers, to create a communal artwork
• Why? To promote American photojournalist James Nachtwey’s campaign to raise awareness of extremely drug resistant TB
• Results: for a short time it felt like this was all over the web, the hunt was solved in 36 hours, loads of participants = success!

More:

• Official moblog: moblog.net/findme/
• Campaign site: XDRTB.org
• BBC article

Vodafone Live Guy

• What is it?  Work out where Live Guy will be in certain parts of the UK, find him, nab yourself a Dell notebook
• Why? This one ticks a lot of boxes – experiential brand activity, highlighting mobile broadband, mobile web AND location based services (there’s a clever marketing team out there that I want to find!)
• Results: Goes live 14th November. Watch this space but I predict a good ‘un

More:

• Partner site: Shiny Shiny
• Official info: Vodafone Live Guy
• Follow on Twitter: twitter.com/vodafoneliveguy

Love Twitter? Hate Twitter?

Too confused to know? Well apparently even ’leading online opinion formers’ aren’t quite sure. Their thoughts on everything from what they love and hate, to what they wish they’d known a year ago, have all been included in a new ShinyRed report Social Media and Brands 2009. You can download a copy of the report and decide for yourself.

Hghlights of the report? Well, um, a certain little grapevine *ahem* was included alongside big bananas like Charlene Li, Antony Mayfield and Neil McIntosh. Thanks for allowing me to participate guys, loving your work!

Other contributors:

• Andy Bargery
• Judy Gibbons
• Katherine Hannaford
• Lloyd Davis
• Oli Barrett
• Rob Andrews
• Sarah Blow
• Simon Darling
• Stuart Dredge
• Susi Weaser
• Tamar Kasriel

Last week I attended the inaugural FRUKT Sessions. I promised to drop a few notes down so here goes.

Dan Southern: Xtreme Insight

Dan kicked off with some interesting vox pops showing that if you ask people what they get for free they can’t recall exactly. Of course we’re accessing a huge range of free services & content everyday (particularly on the internet) but this has become so normal, especially for the young folk, we’re seeing ’Generation Free’

Dominic Hodge: FRUKT

Dominic listed some of the trends which have been driving the culture of free in music:

1. Technology:fast internet speeds & storage ability. P2P networks the obvious example, I love the case study that even though Radiohead gave their album away for free 100s of people within minutes were putting it on P2P site; the behaviour on those communities is entrenched
2. Ethos of creative freedom: internet is disruptive at a philosophical level, some people feel content should be free and they should also be able to take, reuse, repurpose
3. Competition from other industries: Gaming industry, film industry much bigger media providers for consumer than in the past
4. Bad music industry PR: calling customers “thieves” made music companies unpopular and made people more reluctant to buy from them
5. More brands = more promotions

The session wrapped up with a panel featuring: Steve Purdham (We7), Geoff Morley (Blyk), Greg Miall (Sport) and moderated by Ruth Mortimer (Brand Strategy).

I normally gripe a bit about panels being dull but the guests were really well selected but I’m sorry to say I stopped taking notes at this point and just listened. I saw FRUKT taking video so I’m hoping they may put some highlights online. We’ll see.

I’d recommend getting in touch to see if you can get on the list for these events and you can also sign-up for their free fortnightly newsletter Brands, Bands and Fans (which I defy you to say 5 times in a row really fast).

On a final note, thanks to Dan for showing Chris Anderson’s 4 models of ‘free’. Really insightful and something I hadn’t seen before.

The four frees - Chris Anderson

Over the past few months I’ve seen:

• BIMA recruiting for a PR via Twitter
• ShinyRed recruited a grad placement via The Official Facebook Public Relations Group
• Jobs sent out via my contacts on LinkedIn
• PRBlogger advertising a digital AE via his blog

Those are just the ones I can think of right now. Ignoring the obvious “what if they see my drunken pics on Facebook/MySpace”  hype which hopefully everyone has a handle on now, I’m wondering if social media communities are going to replace the recruitment agency?

Social media just provides the tools to tap into your own or others’ networks which were harder to mass broadcast to before Web 2.0 technologies.

Working your community:

Is it really only relevant to those in the digital or markcomms industry? I mean only a tiny fraction of my real world community uses Twitter and Facebook interest is dwindling. But more and more sectors could be tapping into online media to find and share work opportunities. The key is the community element.

I was chatting to a contact at InStylewho said that through her Facebook fashion friends she finds out about events, such as up-and-coming designer shows, that previously it would’ve been harder to track down.

Looking at my old life as a nanny and early childhood teacher my first reaction was social media may not be a good fit, after all who wants someone who’s paid to look after their children sitting on a computer all day? (not in a dodgy way)

But then I thought about how something like Twitter for a nursery school/caregivers could be a lovely way for parents to get updates throughout the day e.g.  ”This afternoon we’re face painting” instead of the slightly disturbing live webcams which are emerging. I can imagine parents swapping tips (they’re word of mouth champions) and tapping into their communities for support e.g. “can anyone recommend a good babysitter for tomorrow night?”. Community sites like Mumsnet and Gurgle are great but not immediate enough for these types of everyday conversations.

When I was a student I paid my way via private nannying and babysitting gigs. It got to the point where word of mouth was keeping me in the style I wanted to become accustomed to. In fact, people called me first because of my community; when I wasn’t available, I knew a childcare professional who was.

Looking for a job in social media:

If you want to look for a new job through social media it’s probably slightly harder if your current friends and communities aren’t online, but there’s also an opportunity for you to find new contacts and also stand out for doing something innovative.

Happy job hunting!

The Blackberry Women and Technology Awards were last night and I wondered how I totally missed this tech event. I didn’t even spot a random Tweet about it this morning.

A quick scan of the official site revealed, disappointingly, that perhaps this wasn’t the techiest event of the year. The nominees and winners hadn’t even been posted 18 hours after the event began (an age in online news terms).

This got me thinking about the benefits of this type of brand association with an event. It’s not a bad idea at all. If you caught the Saatchi & Saatchi ‘Lady Geek’ research last year you’ll have seen there’s a huge missed opportunity to market technology to women (around £600m worth).

So I did a rudimentary Trendpedia search to see who might be “owning conversations” around women and technology. First off I scanned through a quick Google search to see if there were any stand out brands in this space. There weren’t so I just used:

• Blackberry: A product like the Pearl was squarely aimed at women. I also wondered how an event like this was giving them ownership of ”women and technology” conversations
• Philips: Last year I was lucky enough to work on their Aurea campaign which, via fashion partnerships with the likes of Lanvin and media spend in Vogue, should’ve brought them into the female tech consumer conversation
• Saatchi & Saatchi: With their research I wondered if the brand had gained a presence in these types of discussions. I also thought it would provide a realistic contrast against the other two brands.

The search terms I used were [brand] AND women AND technology.

The results:

As expected nothing major came up. Low number of results and of those mainly irrelevant data. (I double-checked on a couple of other tools as well)

Blackberry was sort of ahead of the others. I wonder whether the female Blackberry consumer developed organically (most of the conversations are personal anecdotal mentions) and Blackberry capitalised on it or whether it was something the brand had consciously driven. I’d suspect the former and although awards like the Women And Technology event show they are driving the association, the lack of conversational spike this past week suggests there may be a disconnect between aims and results.

Philips’ conversations were much more news driven with direct commentary on their “female approach” and the products aimed towards women.

Saatchi’s ‘Lady Geek’ research still gets intermittent mentions in women and tech conversation. They weren’t actually that far behind these two big players in the space when you think about it. I wondered if they wanted an ongoing association with this area or had mainly created the research as a PR activity.

I’d love to do a deep dive with the Attentio tracking tool and find out just who are the leading brands in conversations around women and technology, I bet it would throw up a few surprises and a few obvious opportunities. I’d also love to work with a brand who wants to use word-of-mouth marketing and social media to position their brand towards this neglected, but potentially lucrative, tech consumer.

On the video front, while growth in the digital space is rapid I reckon the desire for audio only will always remain. It’s a similar behaviour to choosing to put on a CD or watching music videos. Sometimes you just want to listen to something. 

There’s great growth potential for podcasting. Radio has been an enduring medium, even with the advent of digital technologies, and I see the podcast as simply providing a form of “on-demand radio”. Uptake may be slow, but awareness is growing, suggesting that podcasting suffers from the same challenges as on-demand TV services; if good content exists, it’ll just take time to ensure the delivery model is in place and help the consumer adapt.

I didn’t attend the ‘New TV Insights from Thinkbox’ event the other week but they dropped me a note to point out they have a load of useful downlaodable content on their site. I’m getting particularly engrossed in their Generation Whatever section which has research and presentations on how marketers can target the “yoof” audience.

Also visit the beautifully titled ‘Nickable Charts’ section which has all the facts and figures on TV audiences you could ever wish for; your next powerpoint presentation will thank you for it.

Thinkbox resources