Archive of TheNextWeb.org
Written on May 19, 2008 – 1:44 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Update: By sending fax and email log files, Renée De Meo from Venere proved that it was actually the mistake of the Arcadia Hotel Belmondo.
For most web professionals, the Internet is like a religion. We evangelize the almost endless opportunities of the medium and try to convince people to trust new technologies. It almost sucks us up, and creates some sort of tunnel vision. So when a new technology lets us down, it hits us extra hard. It happened to my co-editor Patrick and me.
We traveled to Hamburg, Germany last Thursday to visit the one-day conference Next08. Right before we left, I booked a hotel via Venere.com. Quite last minute, but hey, we’re busy guys. Moreover, that’s where these services are for. I browsed around, looking for an affordable hotel within walking distance of the Next08 venue and ended up at the Arcadia Hotel Belmondo. When I completed the reservation, I was happily surprised with the confirmation message via SMS.
So after a rather tiring six-hour drive with traffic jams and without a navigation system, Patrick and me arrived at the hotel. A bit stressed, as we were late for the Facebook Developer Garage after party. Yet when we arrived at the reception, a nasty surprise was waiting for us. After a lot of shaking no with her head and desperate looks in our direction, the receptionist told us the hotel was fully booked and she couldn’t find our reservation. When I showed her the confirmation page on my MacBook, she told me that it should have been impossible for us to make a reservation on that very day, as she had closed the booking system in the morning.
There we were standing, two angry young men. Utterly disappointed in the so-beloved medium. In our anger, we decided to write a blog post titled: “when the Internet fails”. Apparently, the disappointment got to our head, as it wasn’t the fault of the medium. It was the fault of one of world’s largest booking sites, Venere. The technology didn’t fail, the people behind the technology did.
Our faith in the web was renewed when the receptionist gave us two WLAN access cards. Within five minutes, we found an excellent last minute offer from a design hotel called Arcotel Rubin. Two minutes later we booked the room on Hotels.com and ten minutes later we were checking into a very comfortable hotel.
So all you fellow technology evangelists out there. Next time you try to make people trust the web, use this story to explain that when new technology fails, it’s often the people and not the whole medium. That might sound familiar to them, as it’s often also the case with technologies that exist for decades. Explain to them that they can use a broad range of new super handy tools, with the same or less risk.
I hope you like that post!
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Written on May 15, 2008 – 8:30 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
When Monte Miersch from German-based Mikestar walked up the stage of the Next08 conference this morning and said he has started an online karaoke service, he got laughed at by the audience and called “pathetic” by the moderator. If Tokyo is the place where people devour karaoke, Hamburg is the other extreme. But let’s face it, almost everybody loves karaoke. And if you don’t, you will after a couple of beers. Moreover, it’s really 2.0 fashionable since Digg set up a Rock Band room at their Web 2.0 Expo party. I still have dreams about the Ok Go show I gave with iJustine.
iJustine and undersigned at the Digg party
So I’d like to take a stand for Miersch, and I’m glad I have the Next Web as a medium. Mikestar allows people to sing together by turning on their webcam and singing the lyrics. Sounds good for people who love a spontaneous karaoke session. I believe it has the potential to become really popular.
After working through some licensing deals, Mikestar launched an open beta version last January and closed one round of VC funding. Their business model makes sense, as they attract a young target group who are sensitive to branding, which Mikestar does in a cool way. For example, they’ve branded a bathroom producer by building a shower around the video screen. Obviously a hint to the secret shower performances of all those aspiring pop stars out there. Moreover, Mikestar sells dvd’s and music.
Miersch told the audience that they’re looking for strategic partnerships with companies that have an international background - meaning not just Germany. Well, I have two pieces of advice: Firstly, develop a Facebook app. It will be a monster hit. Secondly, try North East Asia. At least you won’t get laughed at there.
Written on May 15, 2008 – 5:08 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
“Marketers have no idea how to use social media”. Nate Elliot made a clear statement at Next08 this afternoon. He’s working for JupiterResearch, a New York-based research firm that interviews 10,000 executives from Europe and the US every year. So he’s the kind of guy who knows how to use social media to engage the desired target audience. There are two major problems in this field. The first one is clear, marketers just don’t get the new technologies and the fundamental changes in the way people interact with brands. Although they spend 30,000 dollars on a campaign, half of the branded social network pages only have 1,000 friends or less. Secondly, more than 75 percent of the marketers doesn’t measure whether their campaigns were successfully engaging the audience. And only 15 percent measures brand metrics like ‘awareness’ and ‘attention’.
So while consumers are talking about their brands online, marketers do a bad job in participating in those conversations. “If no one solves these problems, social marketing will have a limited future”, said Elliot. In order to prevent an early death of this new marketing branch, JupiterResearch has created some rules for social marketing - based on similarities in successful campaigns. Elliot” “They’re not revolutionary, but a vast majority of the marketers makes these mistakes”.
Rule 1: Your messages aren’t going to promote themselves
Although a lot of marketers trust on the viral effect of Internet campaigns, 85 percent of them found no viral pass along. So the viral magic only works for less than 15 percent of the campaigns (which I think is still a surprisingly large percentage). Elliot gave the example of the Intel Powers Music campaign. The chip producer started a contest to find the best MySpace bands and created “a really good site” The marketing team realized they had to run payed ads to get people’s attention. So they did. After three days, Intel stopped advertising, expecting the viral hype to take off. It didn’t happen… So lesson no. 1, you have to keep promoting your branded page as viral pass along is scarse.
Rule 2: Focusing on engagement can double your ROI
Most marketers treat their branded social network pages as micro sites. “The Rambo MySpace page looked exactly like Rambo.com. There was no interactivity, no games, nor contest. I see that happening over and over again”, Elliot complained. He stresses that at least a little bit of interactivity can generate on average twice as many friends. A good example is online retail store Zappos. Their CEO Tony Hsieh uses Twitter to promote his store. “It really works”, said Elliot, “it puts a personal face on a huge company.” The consequence of this kind of marketing is that it becomes part of your life. Elliot: “Tony has to update 25 a 30 times a day, just like everybody.”
Rule 3: if you’re not measuring results, you throw away money.
“It’s a little bit scary to learn that more than 75 percent of the marketers isn’t measuring the results of their campaigns. If you’re not measuring you don’t know whether your money is well spent nor if your campaigns are getting better”. No matter how you do it, set a goal and measure against it! When the audience asked Elliot for some ways of measuring, he didn’t really give a satisfying answer. Of course you can measure the number of friends, but that doesn’t say a lot about engagement. You can also use technology to study the online behavior of visitors or take surveys to find out what your consumers think. “Eventually, marketers have to connect the dots”, Elliot concluded.
Further reading
I was slightly shocked to learn that marketers make so many mistakes on the field of social marketing. If you count yourself to one of those marketers, I suggest your start following Muhammad Saleem, whose well-know as THE social media marketing expert and marketing guru Seth Godin, as he blogs about the way you should think these days.
Written on May 15, 2008 – 3:13 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Web 2.0 is all about sharing and Steve Rubel is obviously aware of that. An 2.0 maven like him has no problem with sharing some inner thoughts, like…, well.., hallucinations. The thing is, Mr. Rubel sometimes has visions about where the web is going. No problem if you ask me, since wasn’t it acid hippie professor Timothy Leary who said that Internet is the new LSD? So please allow me tell you about Rubel’s vision on the next web.
For those of you who don’t know Steve Rubel, he’s an experienced digital marketer and influential blogger pioneer who has built a large following and is now working for one of world’s largest PR firms, Edelman. During his Next08 keynote Rubel shared some of his knowledge of marketing trends, his so-called open files. After discussing the well-known shift from mass reach to micro reach, the different types of internet users and the tunnel vision of web professionals - we think everybody is on Twitter-, he turned to his open files.
He divided the open files in three types: faint signals - the cut & paste web, rise of experts and collaboration -, watchlist - living room 2.0 and geek marketers, and - there they are - hallucinations. Steve Rubel has two of them, namely digital nomads and data leaking.
Data leaking
Corporations are losing control of their information, as it’s leaking out of their ruined fortresses. The walls weren’t build for keeping the technologies of the new digital age out. Employees are communicating through Facebook and LinkedIn, instead of using the corporate email. Moreover, they work collaboratively on Google documents. This is scary for walled organizations, as they can’t control information anymore. According to Rubel, this trend will become more salient over the coming years.
Digital Nomads
These guys quit their corporate lives to start traveling from city to city and work as consultants. They use web-based tools to work together with others. Rubel: “You can see them working in Starbucks a lot, or at those new co-working facilities.” Although a few thousand people have been adopting this lifestyle - like my friend Polle de Maagt -, Rubel calls it “worth watching”.
I think of the current lifestyles, this is one of the most romantic. Those digital nomads are the new Jack Kerouac’s and Hunter S. Thompson’s: traveling to wherever life takes them and meeting interesting people all over the world. All these experiences are documented in their blogs that inspire other people.
Share your hallucinations
I’m really glad Steve Rubel has shared his hallucinations, as it gave the audience some interesting new insights. I’m sure that I’m not alone when I say most speakers tend to repeat stuff we already know. Sometimes, they just have to leave their guard down and share those thoughts that are a little bit out there. Maybe even further than data leaking and digital nomading.
Written on May 15, 2008 – 2:13 pm
Patrick de Laive, Internet entrepreneur and co-founder of The Next Web Conference
Earlier we reported about Animoto, but that was before they launched their Facebook app. Werner Vogels, CTO Amazon is presenting at Next08 and started of by showing a short movie he made on Animoto followed by the Animoto fairytale.
Animoto was running on Amazon EC2 server and was using 50 servers when they had 25.000 users (note that their technology needs a lot of compute power). Probably most of you were already users then.
Now it becomes interesting. The day they launched their Facebook app, they signed up 25.000 new users per HOUR, resulting in the need of scaling to 3500 servers within 2 days. If it wasn’t for Amazon Animoto would have gone down and missed the million new users which would probably be the end of this great service.
I wonder how long it would take to call Dell, get the country manager on the line and negotiate a deal on buying 3500 new servers, meanwhile calling your local data center telling them you’re buying all their space immediately and order him to start building a new data center next to it…. I’m not sure but my guess is it takes more then two days and then I’m not talking about the costs of such a process and the opportunity costs of all those new Pro accounts.
Breaking news: Amazon invests in Animoto! Good call Jeff and Werner
Save 5 dollars on a signup (and give me 3 months extra :)) via the referral code: oqilswmk
Written on May 15, 2008 – 2:00 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
So I’m am the Next08 conference watching some start-ups that give a five minute elevator pitch. I can’t understand them all, as not all the German entrepreneurs here are as smart as Amazee, Jupidi, Mikestar and Toksta, since they present in German. I’m sure this is more comfortable for them as it’s their native language, and of course, most of the services are focused on the German market, but something doesn’t feel right here.
There have been many discussions about the advantages of building a start-up in Europe. The most mentioned advantage almost always is that we Europeans speak several languages, which makes us localization experts. Yet after a few months of traveling through Europe and visiting start-up communities in London, Geneva, Paris, Brussels, Gent, and now Hamburg, I’m starting to believe the language thing is our biggest weakness as well.
You know, most of these young aspiring entrepreneurs are obviously giving a good show here, since the German-speaking audience here is really excited, to say the least. But do they realize that there are some of the most influential web professionals walking around here, who don’t understand a word of what they’re saying? While hundreds of start-ups are dying for some attention from influentials like Steve Rubel and Stowe Boyd, these presenting entrepreneurs just ignore them by speaking another language.
So whether you’re from Germany, Holland, Italy or France, an international attitude really pays of at an international conference. Even if it’s just a mention on a blog, like Amazee, Jupidi, Mikestar and Toksta got. Viel glueck!
Written on May 15, 2008 – 11:20 am
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
When you own a blog, you’re probably always looking for ways to create a bond with your readers. If your readers feel connected to you, they’ll probably comment and read more. Not to mention the power of word of mouth. A good way to create this sort of commitment is an integrated social network. There are several Wordpress plugins offering extra functions with a social network feel to it, yet it takes a lot of time, knowledge and effort to modify them to your needs. So I’m glad to tell you a new start-up has come along which offers an instant community for your convenience.
Patrick, Andreas Stephan from Six Groups, and undersigned
German-based Six Groups has developed an easy tool that allows you to include a community by just copy/pasting a javascript snippet. This adds a bar at the top of your page, showing a community lifestream, the number of users that are online and a sign-up button. You can customize the design by selecting a theme. As a user you have access to the regular social networks features, like a wall, lifestream and a personal library for photos and text documents. All in all, it’s a pretty neat community solution for bloggers and site owners who don’t have the budget for a totally-customized social network.
I met the Six Groups founders last night at the Facebook Developer Garage after party in Hamburg. They’re presenting at the Next08 conference today and already have an alpha version of their tool running on the Next08 site (So check that one out). When I was talking to co-founder Andreas Stephan, I immediately started thinking about the “yet another sign-up page”-tiredness. I’ve signed up to enough social networks already. So I said to him I’d only blog about his start-up if he promised to support OpenID. He did, so let’s see whether Six Groups lives up to it.
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The Next Web Blog is closely associated with The Next Web Conference which is held annually in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. At this event speakers from all over the world come together to talk about, and show of, the future of the Web. (
