Twitter dating

The life-span of a twitter crush: "you reply to a casual remark from the person you're interested in. He/she checks out your profile an alternately can reply back or ignore you or thank you for your comment. In the first two cases you have a chance still, the "thank you" is a definite "no". You post a second reply and make it flirty. If cases 1 and 2 have occurred then you get a shout back and then intense @xxx and @xxx ensues. This goes on for about a week before the first meeting happens. Then a pause [evaluating after the meet] and then one of two things happens, either conversation continues with less frequency, in which case you know the meet did not go well but ended without sex, or no conversation happens anymore in which case two things, again, may have occurred: the meet went very well and now you're on "phone call" basis with the person or the meeting ended in bad sex and you're embarrassed to talk."

This is a shortened version of a 'Twitter dating guide' intro a friend is putting together after intense observation of Twitter patterns among a closed community (say people in marketing and advertising) :-)

A piece of work I am sure we can all cherish :-D

My first block in Facebook

I have finally found a use for Facebook. Normally, I dutifully ignore all requests and reply to some messages but tonight I took extreme pleasure in blocking a certain young politician, former Justice Ministry, who tried to add me.
This, I felt, was relevant because the act of blocking was a political response. It made me able to place a political choice.
It also made me think of how important it is for public people to understand how to use social media. Simply building a profile and then randomly adding people - or worse asking your agency to do it - will only annoy people.
Instead think about building content, use Facebook tools to analyse your audience's profiles, build knowledge instead of building data bases for SPAM.

Back to school gear

In the new age of technology, back to school is not what it used to be. Today, if you're a student and getting ready to come back on campus you need to read these two (1 and 2) articles to find out what you need :-)
thanks CrunchGear

"Subgroups" and "subcultures"

I had an interesting - if mildly annoyed time at AdFel today (yes, Costin, you did piss me off) because we talked, TRANSIENTLY :), about the use of special-interest groups in advertising. Sometimes referred to as subcultures or subgroups or niche groups, these include anything from emos, artisans, goths, skaters, ravers, hippies, Vamaiotzi, you name it.
And one thing that did get me thinking was the idea that there are a number of subcultures which are simply off-limits for communication because they are deemed "inferior". Anyone listening to manele is part of a group which advertisers won't touch unless to poke fun at. Equally mockable but uninteresting for communications are the Romanian nouveau riche (recognizable by their white SUVs, all black suits and propensity for Armani, D&G and Cavalli) or the yet-unnamed huge number of people watching Romania's crazy tabloid TV station OTV.
The reason behind this hands-off attitude is, as always, fear: fear that the animosity mainstream Romanians feel towards these groups will affect brand equity and sales. Brand managers assume all their consumers are decent, elegant and nice, and fear the day when they will have to slum it with subcultures.
BUT, OTV is among the highest rated TV stations in Romania: fact. Hi5, with specially designed Cavalli wallpaper pages by 14 yos from Popesti Leordeni (that's the equivalent of a small white trash town in the US) beats Facebook: fact. People who are willing to slash out on 100k white cars probably are more likely to buy higher margin products: learned assumption.
So, what do we do? Do we hang on to an elitist and somewhat narrow minded understanding of what is culturally acceptable or do we try to capitalize on these so-called subcultures?
[and in case everyone is worried we will damage our cultural heritage, please remember this is not culture as in arts and sciences but popular culture, much harder to control and sway by institutional means].

Digital conversations

Yet another video about the power of the audience. What stuck is the idea that when people pool together their ideas something innovative might come up. Maybe it's time to take the ideas which come out of the age of conversation and start doing something with them.

More on research

"P&G’s focus on consumers gives new lease of life to the company" .. that;'s what Fortune says about the new consumer consumer centric attitude of the giant. I'm saying consumer twice because naturally they were consumer cnetric before so now they must be twice that ...
OTOH, Apple overtly disses any market research stating that they make products they would love and that seems to work.
But they both make money.
Two great companies with two very different approaches to creating meaning and the questions is how can they both be right. One says people have no idea what they want and the other says that only by listening to people you can understand what they want.
Truth lies in the middle. I think that people truly don’t know what they want but their actions speak louder than words and by observing them, you get more information than you would talking to them. Basically when asked to rationalize what they want they put to work a host of notions they are familiar with. But innovation does not work with notions everyone knows. What it does is it takes things we do not have a notion for yet and makes them part of communication. If people could tell you what they wanted then it would already exist. The trick is to see what they do and find a name and a solution for it. Maybe that is the real definition of what we mean when we say insight.

Telecom communication

I am constantly surprised by the lack of insight telecom advertising displays in Romania. The comms we see always seem to assume that people want to talk more and they need more minutes. Nothing new or relevant is ever tried to answer some of the following:
- I want free minutes in all networks
- I want free minutes which I can use when I want not when the network does
- I want free stuff when I pay more for the services I use
- I want to recharge my mobile from my mobile
- I don't want to listen to a gazzilion of ads before I can talk to a client service person
- I do not want to sign a contract for a lifetime in order to get benefits
- I want cool phones with the lifetime contract you make me sign - i don't want to sign up for a two dime handset

I put it all down to laziness or greed.

The hypermarket "trap"

Talking about hypermarkets and choice I was handed the best insight in the category: the reason hypermarkets and supermarkets in Romania have a registered the highest growth in retail (over 20%) is simple: we hate interacting with the shop assistants from our corner shops. :-) Because they have names like Gina, Irina or Mariana, always have something better to do than pay attention to you, never remember who was next in line, always remember that you owe them 0.0000001 cents from last time, sometimes forget to load up all your groceries even though you paid for all, give you bad candy for change...

Hypermarkets are better, you can change your mind about something you wanted to buy and the tellers are quick, quiet and wear matching outfits :-) Quote Izzard "true story!"


Thanks Dragos

Selfish Internet

Internet success is pretty much driven by selfishness and common sense and how to use common sense to satisfy selfishness.

This is just a taste of the kinds of things Dragos Manac says about Internet and communication. We had a great talk which I will write up and post asap. Not tonight though because I am bushed ...

Customer experience

We often forget how important it is. But according to this presentation it can mean the difference between growing your business or shrinking it.

Love this pic especially via

Whoa, talk about UGC

This little movie has 31 MILLION views on youtube. More than any commercial we've probably ever made in Romania. And it looks like it cost, hmmm, maybe 10 dollars...
whoa ...

Cultural attraction

Romanian is a Latin based language and we are supposed to be francophiles. Interestingly enough, however, when Carrefour first opened all taxi operators used to call it "carefour' [kerfur] and now they also call Auchan - [ocean]. I think it comes from 98% content everywhere being in English rather than any other language.

Maybe one more reason why I write this blog in English. Rather than French that is :-P

Popular availability for content

I had a pedestrian weekend with loads of family engagements and some fun on the side and two things stuck out.

One, I was speaking to a friend about interesting things we might be wanting to explore and I brought up gaming and game creators. I find games the coolest form of popular content, while not the easiest to make. I think that maybe game creators are the Balzacs of this generation and I was wondering if anyone in Romania would be interested in hearing about this. My friend told me no, it was too early. And yet, we have half the entire urban young population having at least had a brush with World of Warcraft, the Sims or other such games. Why not go to the next level and start interesting them with similar stuff which is done locally?

Two, I might have given myself the answer to the above while attending a local stand-up comedy show. I have never been to stand-up abroad and I may be mistaken in assuming this never happens there, but there were a bit too many people in that room unwilling to "play the game". This is what I mean: when you read literature or watch a movie or a theater play, something called suspension of disbelief should kick in. Fiction or entertainment for that matter is not fun if you question its actuality. You HAVE, for the sake of your own fun, to effectively pause and believe whatever they tell you - suspend your disbelief for the duration of the game.
In the stand-up I saw last night people chose to not do that: they chose to react to what the speakers were saying and insult them. Instead of running with the imagination and having a bit of fun they preferred to question and spoil it for everyone.

So, maybe our inability to perform a suspension of disbelief is what prevents us from enjoying stand-up, writing local games and for that matter making ads that go beyond mom telling daughter that she uses this or that detergent.

Tyranny of the consumer

My work is a constant source of questions.
Today I was wondering how much we should be asking our consumers to solve for us. We ask them to rate our products, to decide on packaging, an communication, to evaluate our brand, to create content for us. Today, I heard that consumers can also be asked what product they would like the company to produce. Surely that should be a question the company must know in advance..
Or not?
I mean I understand the concept of crowd sourcing but truly if the consumer knows all and we only do what he tells us, what are being paid for? are we not slaves to a tyrant who's sometimes less informed than us? do we not suck ass? :-)
This deserves more thought.

Personal monopolies

The trouble with a monopoly is (among other of course) that it refuses consumer input as a source of improvement. You cannot change its ways because you have no other option. It's their way or nothing for you.

I have noticed however that we have a tendency to impose our own personal monopolies for reasons which pertain mainly to ill-targeted comfort.

For instance, I buy most of my small groceries from a neighborhood shop: the shop assistants often "forget" to put some of my groceries in the bag, to give me the receipt thus effectively overcharging me quite often and usually are unwilling to take any complaint I may have about the broken egg in the carton or the sour milk. Because they have discovered my weakness: i have made their shop into a personal monopoly, i come back even thought i don't have to because I have mentally convinced myself that i have no other option.

How many times do we do that? How many times do we refuse to take a stand because it's more comfortable to do so? How many times did we go back to the same bank although they failed to explain some missing funds or the "new" interest rate?

The thing is that the more personal monopolies we establish the less checks brands have. And leave a brand unchecked and it will do some nasty things to you, because, as a good friend was telling me, they are not here to make sense, they are here to make money. And money is just figures :-)

How many ads a day?

Everyone is always wondering how many ads we are exposed to in a regular day. No definite reply yet although the Americans seem to have more of a clue.
I have done a brief calculation (I added up the average no. of ads in an hour times the 3-4 hs I watch TV, the sites I visit in a day leveraged against number of revisits, the radio ads I listen to during the drive back, the number of billboards I pass by and the print ads; I have not included ads on bags, food stuffs nor posters in windows which would probably have doubled the amount) and I estimate I brush against approx 700.

How about you?
pic via