WOM Trends

Meaning: Warner Brothers, could there have been a better way to handle this "Watchmen" situation?

What we're speaking about is the leaked opening credits of Warner Bros' superhero-laden film "Watchmen," and the peculiar reaction of the film company:

"The special effects firm that put together the opening credit sequence for Watchmen, yu+Co, posted them to their Web site on March 6. Now yu+Co's taken the titles down, per Watchmen studio Warner Bros' request. Bad move, Warner. The sequence, which probably used less total footage from the film than any of Warner's poorly produced trailers, wasn't anything but free publicity for a film that needs help at the box office.

It used to be agonizing enough just having to face others in a presentation. We all know of the perverse paranoia that can sometimes accompany public speaking, when otherwise innocuous actions take on a sinister feel. A hushed whisper over here, a note passed over there. God forbid: a chuckle!

Today, there is the added dimension of Twitter. Just last week we posted about Twitter CEO Evan WIlliams facing his own music at TED, when he was presented with 50 tweets that occurred about his presentation in just a scant eight minutes.

But, says speaking expert Olivia Mitchell, there are definite advantages to listeners twittering away during your presentation.

We wrote last month of the possible impending doom of Google searches in the face of the dynamic, live-updating Twitter searches. Maybe we were just sounding alarms, ringing warning bells that should have been stowed away.

Or, maybe not. "As of February, Twitter Search attracted 1.35 million users while Google Blog Search, which has been plagued by relevance issues, sits at 1.38 million users."

Now of course, Google Blog Search is by no means Google Search, and Google Search attracts FAR more than 1.38 million users per month. Billions, trillions, these numbers might be more accurate.

But something is happening in the search world, and it seems that individuals are breaking towards primary-source information, as most individuals prefer in their everyday lives.

"Dolphin-safe tuna" is now the norm, the ubiquitous, ethical choice, for those purchasing a can of tuna. It's been nearly 20 years since StarKist first began providing this option for tuna in 1992. And, while the implications of that once new, ethical tuna choice, may have faded away into the distant past, Richard Edelman points out in his new post "We're Entering a New Era of Mutual Social Responsibility," just how important that move was. The product change was the direct result of NGO pressure, and Edelman thinks we're entering into an even more mutually interdependent stage between customers and providers of products.

First, it was TV who was doing the killing of stars, albeit radio ones Today, according to Paul Graham, it is TV that has lost, and being killed. His premise begins ominous enough, "About twenty years ago people noticed computers and TV were on a collision course and started to speculate about what they'd produce when they converged."

Well, we've reached that "twenty years later," and the results are in: TV lost. "The TV networks already seem, grudgingly, to see where things are going, and have responded by putting their stuff, grudgingly, online.

If you've got a Kindle, Amazon's paperless eBook reader, then this post has a real-life applicability for you; Kindlefeeder will allow you to "aggregate your favorite feeds and have them delivered to your Kindle in a convenient, easy-to-navigate format. "

If you don't have a Kindle, then this post is an alert; paperless news has taken a new step. It was just a matter of time, of course, but it's still worth noting how far paperless portable news has come in the last few years. From newspapers, to news websites on phones, to news websites and RSS on smartphones like Blackberrys and iPhones, to news websites on eBook readers, to RSS on eBook readers.

In 2008, the number of people in the world using SMS text messages surpassed three billion people, a staggering 45 percent of the world's population. The average American now sends four SMS messages per day, which means America has now caught up to the European SMS pace. Moreover, 76 percent of all mobile phone subscribers in the world use SMS texting. Communities Dominate Brands asks, what does this all mean?

For the first time ever in the U.K., email is no longer the holder of the title of most popular in the battle between social networks and email. 67 percent of Britons who went online were doing so on social networking sites, compared to only 65 percent who said they were emailing.

Skittle's new homepage is raising a lot of eyebrows, and "Still #1 on Twitter's trending topics, the new Skittles homepage is clearly today's hot topic in social media."

This is not to say everyone is lauding the new Skittles homepage, which is now a Twitter search feed monitoring coverage of the world "Skittles." Some have likened it to a Modernista rip-off, additionally short-sighted and lacking vision.

But others applaud the change, crediting Skittles with kudos for turning over a new leaf and turning over the voice of its website to the voice of its customers.

This is mightily impressive: more than 90 percent of South Koreans in their 20s, and more than one-third of the entire population of South Koreans, are registered users of Cyworld.

Cyworld is doing what Facebook is only trying to do: breaking even, and merging online shopping and social networking.

Part of the reason seems to be the market that Cyworld is dealing in. As opposed to majority of the rest of the world, Google does not have a major market share in South Korea. It is no coincidence that, as well, South Koreans generally do not prefer simplistic, pared down websites, like Google's homepage. Instead content-rich, media-dense sites pique South Korean interest.

Wait, what's Qzone you ask?

"The site, part of the larger Tencent internet portal, claims to have had more than 200 million monthly active users in January, according to China Web2.0 Review (a translated version of the release is also available at the Web2Asia blog). Facebook, otherwise considered the largest social network in the world, self-reported 175 million monthly active users earlier in February."

If this self-reported number is to be believed, then in fact, Qzone is the largest social network in the world. We were surprised too.

VentureBeat points out that web traffic analysis is quite poor, and that Chinese investors generally don't trust third party analytics based in China.

The dissension in our ranks of WOMM movers and shakers, with regards to opinion leaders, is usually this: do they matter or don't they?

Watts & Dodds say, heck no!
Keller & Berry say, darn right!

Martin Oetting of WOMMA member company trnd and Empowered Involvement (http://www.empoweredinvolvement.com/2009/02/24/the-opinion-leader-grid-for-word-of-mouth-marketing/) says, it depends!

He's put together the fantastic, simple but not simplistic, Opinion Leader Grid for Word-of-Mouth Marketing. There are two indices on this grid: 1) Is this a high- or low-risk purchase/product?

Bloghound's Lois Kelly admits she is on one of her "usual rants on dumb company marketing and PR stories," and we're happy she is.

This time, she's taking on "stupid press release tricks," something comparable perhaps to Letterman's Stupid Human Tricks; they've got a nice gimmicky appeal to them, but they're otherwise pretty useless.

Says Kelly,
I’m getting mighty tired of hearing executives demanding press releases for every little thing, turning smart PR organizations into press release factories with little strategic value.
What gives?

In the wake of the Facebook ownership scandal of the last few weeks, many people have probably taken a step back and looked at their social network usage. Most of those individuals did not remove their Facebook profiles. But some did, and it's useful to look into the reasoning behind leaving a powerful social presence.

We've selected one such case: http://krustallos1.blogspot.com/2009/02/why-i-deleted-my-facebook-account.html, and we encourage you to read the post, and the comments.

The post is broken down into a few sections:
1) Why did I do this?

Here's some news to track if you're feeling the pinch of the economic downturn. In the book Communities Dominate Brands, it was reported that as far back in 2007 in Korea, "all three mobile phone networks had enabled full mobile payments and for example five separate credit card services were enabled on the three networks and that the default setting for new credit cards in South Korea was to enable it to your mobile phone, with the traditional plastic card as the optional extra, sent to your home mailing address only if you wanted the plastic card as well."

Basically, forget pay-as-you-go, the norm had become pay-on-the-go. Should this technology ever spread to the rest of us outside of South Korea, the possibilities for WOM marketing would change greatly.