Tag Archives: Consumers

Will people pay for web content?

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ereaderI think the issue revolves around which platform or device people are consuming the paid for content on.

It’s going to be hard work to get people subscribing or making micro payments to view news on their home PC, but take news out of the home and it could be much easier.

People are getting very used to making payments online for other forms of digital content. These include gaming content through Xbox Live, iPhone applications and of course music.

When doing this most of the time people are making payment through a proprietary device or piece of software, which users have had to specifically download or invest in for the purpose of performing a paid for download. Because of this their readiness to invest further time and money is a more logical step and one they are more ready to take.

If for example I have an iPhone and download a paid for application it brings value to my initial investment in the iPhone, I planned and knew when purchasing the device that I would pay for downloads. The Application is also tangible by the virtue that you can hold the devise through which you have downloaded it in your hand. The same works with Xbox Live, through which you can download games and video content on to your hard drive and own. This is a rather unique situation because Xbox Live is the only place you can get most of this content and the Xbox is the only device on which you can use it.

Because of its topical up-to-date nature and need for virtually instant delivery news is a very different form of media to those mentioned above and so the mechanism through which it is consumed digitally with the possibility for subscription must also be different.

On existing devices it could be very difficult to get people either paying a subscription or making article-by-article micro payments for news content because, perhaps with the exception of iPhone, people have not purchased any of their devices with this in mind.

I believe that with the growth, development and standardisation of eReaders people will be more ready to pay for content. This will be through subscription-based services to weekly or monthly periodicals or for a live news service, which could be charged for using a subscription or based on usage and charged for per article.

When people invest in a piece of technology like an eReader they will want to get value from their investment and an audience for digital subscriptions will grow. Depending on who releases ‘the’ device that changes the way people think about eReaders this could take 5 – 10 years. If Apple release one things could change overnight!

Intimate Communication

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twitter-drop-inThe more you use Twitter the more interesting it becomes and the more you learn about other people and yourself.

As I have previously written I have only recently been discovering what Twitter means to me and have still not really completely settled on what that is.

What I do know for sure is that Twitter isn’t RSS. It doesn’t really work if all you do is automatically feed it through recently posted entries, Tweeting out a link and the headline. As a user there are other more effective tools that you can use that for and as a publisher there is a whole lot more you can do with Twitter.

I recently had a conversation with Dan Thornton, Community Marketing Manager at Bauer Media, who outlined the following to me.

Twitter is a place for individuals, including those that work for a company or brand, to interact on a personal level – so their messages are far more valuable than an automated feed from a website or blog post.

By authentically posting, you add details and personality, giving it much more value and impact – which encourages people to interact with you and build up a relationship with you and the company you work for.”

Dan Thornton, Community Marketing Manager at Bauer Media

If as a user I come to a site and am tech savvy enough to want news updates automatically fed through to me as soon as they happen; then I will have an RSS reader, I might not want a the personal touch that Twitter can add, I just want to know when news has happened and read it, RSS performs that function perfectly.

As a user, choosing to follow somebody or something on Twitter means you want more a more intimate relationship with the person or brand. You want to interact and have a conversation on a personal level.

As Dan mentioned this gives that communication much more value and impact and creates the possibility for people and brands to forge more meaningful, intimate relationships.

Let’s look at a couple of examples.

1. I stopped following Reuters yesterday because as I mentioned to Dan (@badgergravling) via Twitter “The more I use Twitter the more automatically generated posts become invisible.”

Looking at their Tweets resembles looking at an automatically generated RSS Feed. Entries like this can work sometimes when you send them out. These tended to come in all at the same time a few times a day so would temporarily completely take over my twitter feed and crowd out message people have spent time personalising.

I still don’t completely disagree with sending out entries like this but I think there needs to be a balance so that the quality of what you are sending out to people makes them anxiously anticipate the next one an enjoy it for what it is not just as a promotional link.

Reuters is a news service so we could look at this as exactly what we would expect from them. They are still a brand though and this is a missed opportunity for their brand to start a conversation with it’s consumers rather than telling them something that they can already get somewhere else.

reuters_twitterhttp://twitter.com/reuters

2. If we look at Dan’s tweets you can instantly see that it’s very much a conversational broadcast platform. It’s interesting and intimate.

This is a personal twitter page rather than a brand’s page, as in the Reuters example above. We need not think that because of that they should be different and the Reuters should be doing what they are doing and Dan should be doing what he is doing.

dan_twitterhttp://twitter.com/badgergravling

The second example above is clearly the more engaging one as the entries come in different shapes and sizes. This is going to hold my attention and keep me more interested in them.

As a twitter novice it’s really easy when you first come to Twitter as a brand to think that the best use of Twitter for you will be to set up Twitter feed and let it go to work and that’s it, just leave it to pick up the occasional click through to your content.

The fact is – you then miss out on the ability Twitter offers your brand to have an ongoing dialogue with your consumer and for them to really engage with your brand values and build up a strong relationship with it. The users who are then following your Brand and receiving personal communications from it on a regular basis are more likely to buy into other aspects of the Brand.

I read a book by Kevin Roberts, CEO Worldwide of Saatchi & Saatchi, a few years ago called Lovemarks: the future beyond brands.

One of the key factors that is crucial in turning your brand into a Lovemark is your consumer having an intimate relationship with it.

The third signature of a Lovemark is that people feel they have an intimate connection with it (the brand). Intimacy is about body contact, scent, touch. You want to be close.  You feel pain when it is withdrawn. The signposts about community, loyalty and relationships fit right here.”

saatchikevin.com

The ability Twitter has to make that intimate connection with a consumer rather than just push out automatically generated links is what makes it so special and what gives a brands presence on the service real value and purpose.

Talk to your followers, start a conversation with them, love them and they will love you.

Money Making Machine

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consoles-drop-inAlthough I haven’t had much time to play them recently I love games and so do millions around the world. I’ve got an Xbox 360 and a PS3 both of which offer the ability to download content.

On the Xbox Live marketplace You can download films, music videos, games and updates. These features are also available on PS3 but I have not used them much so for the purpose of this post I’ll concentrate on Xbox.

As I did yesterday I want to keep thinking along the lines of the ways in which brands can adapt, evolve and diversify their offering using the network to enable their consumers to be reached and by monetized by the brand in new and exciting ways, which add value to the ownership of the product and the brand in question.

In April 2004 I wrote my university dissertation about games. It was entitled “Does Non-Linearity Improve or Diminish the Player’s Experience of a Narrative Within a Videogame?”

It concluded with the following paragraph

Instead of being a projection of our feelings, which a completely non- linear narrative would be, a prescripted narrative gives “us something safely outside ourselves (because it is made by somebody else) upon which we can project our feelings.” (Murray, 2001: 100), prescripted narrative does not diminish but enrich the experience of a narrative.”

Me, 2004
Murray, Janet H. Hamlet on the Holodeck, 2001.

Essentially as players, readers, watchers and listeners we always need an author outside of our self to have a satisfying unexpected narrative experience.

This is still true and for games publishers is brilliant news in the current climate because their networked products allow consumers to access media at their convenience and without any middle man, which means the price point is reduced while maintaining a healthy profit margin, essential to allow the flow of revenue into a business when prohibitively high prices drive people away from investing £40-50 a time in a new game.

Microsoft have perfectly positioned their Xbox business for changes in the economic climate and have an incredibly diverse set of consumer offerings available to help their business and their consumers a way to ride out the storm while still making money and enjoying narrative content.

I am really interested to see how GTA IV: The Lost And Damned sells when it is released soon. It’s an expansion pack which requires that the gamer has purchased an copy of the original copy of the game, so have already made a sizeable investment in that narrative. Those investors are now required to make an additional payment to download the expanded narrative content over the Xbox Live marketplace. GTA is the fastest selling game of all time shifting over 6 million copies in the first week alone, I’d estimate that the game has now sold in excess on 20m units (I will check this with Rockstar tomorrow and update) so the potential market for this expansion pack HUGE.

Microsoft paid Rockstar $50m in order to make the expansion pack exclusive to Xbox 360, it will not be available on the PS3, a wise investment in trying economic times? YES.

More games are following suit with expansion packs being released for Fallout 3 and others which extend the life of the product (Microsoft made a mistake in not planning an expansion pack for HALO3) whilst taking more revenue which traditional online play offers the opportunity for.

Couple all of that with the ability for consumers to pay small amounts to download movies and Microsoft have created a networked money making machine.

The Departed Didn’t Stand A Chance

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woolworths-drop-inThere is a lot of talk about the businesses that have already gone into administration as a result of the global credit crunch. The truth is they were never going to survive long term because they didn’t adapt to serve their digitally evolved consumers.

I used to go to Woolworths about 10 years ago, there is one smack bang in the centre of my home town of Frome in Somerset. It was probably the biggest shop in the town. The last time I went past a Woolworths I had a look inside and it was exactly the same as I remember it being 10 years ago, selling exactly the same things in exactly the same way. Although Marks & Spencer are not in great shape they have completely changed their consumer offering while maintaining brand values.

The fact is Woolworths, which some people look at as a national institution, was an incredibly badly run business because they didn’t talk to their consumers and as a result had no any idea about the way their spending habits and lifestyle had changed. Why? Because they are not networked.

Had they over time become a digitally networked company that diversified the way their business made money they wouldn’t have been forced into administration. The same is true of Zavvi. Why would one of the country’s most successful entrepreneurs want to sell a business? Because the asset doesn’t have the potential to deliver a return large enough to sustain itself let alone deliver a profit.

  • I am aware that both businesses had websites. But they didn’t offer consumers a serious alternative to the quickly established new boys on the block of digital entertainment sales.

Reading a piece David Cushman, Director of Social Media at Brando-Digital, wrote on Monday about fear in 2009 got me thinking on these paths. I commented on his article at the time.

At £50 a pop it will be interesting to see how games sales hold up this year. I suppose the marketplace on Xbox Live, which allows users to download cheaper additions to games, like the upcoming add on for GTA, will help diversify their revenue streams which will hold up a possible downturn in hard copy sales.

Reading this morning about the success of the iPhone app store http://tinyurl.com/7q6wy8 reinforces your point about business models that don’t fit the networked world. This one does and it will be HUGE in ’09, perhaps helping to balance out their hardware business, which is in decline.”

Me on Who’s afraid of 2009? – http://fasterfuture.blogspot.com

It is businesses that have diversified their offering which allow for changes in consumer behaviour that will not perhaps prosper in the current economic climate but certainly ride out the storm and not get themselves into the same trouble that Woolworths did by staying exactly the same.

I’ll finish with a quote (sales pitch) from Duncan Stewart that resonated with me today.

During recessions, the companies that follow bold strategies and make significant investment decisions are the ones that succeed when the economy recovers”

Duncan Stewart, Director Research Technology, Media and Telecommunication at Deloitte Canada

Duncan’s words are well worth taking heed of for companies that need to adapt and invest wisely over the next two years in order to emerge on the other side of the current economic downturn with a diversified range of offerings that are again primed to deliver serious dividends.