Media Guardian Innovation Awards 2010

Hayley from the Guardian dropped me a line to tell me about this year’s MediaGuardian Innovation Awards, which launched yesterday.

The Megas are in their third year and reward all that’s brightest and best across the media and new media landscapes.

Last year’s winners included a virtual surgery designed to fight cervical cancer, a ballet dedicated to football, a chocolate letter and an internet balloon race. The coveted MediaGuardian Innovator of the Year award was won by the BBC iPlayer. The ceremony last year was hosted by the lovely Lauren Laverne, and the provisional event date for this year’s is Thursday 25th March 2010.

Steve Busfield, Head of Media and Technology for Guardian News & Media (GNM), and chair of the Megas judging panel, said: “Never before has innovation in the media industry been so widespread – and important – as it has been in the last 12 months or so. The media landscape is undoubtedly changing, and we’re hugely excited to announce a range of new categories for the 2010 awards to reflect this shift towards new media and online technologies. As ever, we’ve got a top-notch judging panel this year, reflecting all corners of the media industry – as well as some of last year’s winners – and I’m sure that this year’s judging process will be just as hard fought as last year, with debate, discussion and dialogue as well as vehement argument.”

The categories for the 2010 Megas are:

Launch
PR
Advertising
Creative
Technology
Use of Web Platforms
Applications
Business Model
Startup
Community Engagement
Gadget
Independent media
Innovator of the Year

Judges include Marko Balabanovic, Jason Bradbury, Damian Blackden, Hussain Chowdhury, Aleks Krotoski and Patrick Walker.

Further details about all the categories, the full judging panel and information on how to enter are available at http://www.guardian.co.uk/megas.

The Megas are also on twitter at http://www.twitter.com/guardianmegas.

The closing date for applications is 4 December 2009. The winners will be announced in March 2010 at a presentation ceremony in central London.

iZoca

iZoca is a new social network which focusses on event management and helping organisations to communicate better.

I was first alerted to the service after reading about it on Sociable Blog, but it wasn’t until Susan Bardack from iZoca got in touch that my interest was perked.

iZoca has so far raised over $600,000 in funding, which has largely gone on developing the network itself.

Within iZoca the focus is on a section called ‘My World’ which contains your monthly calendar, your weekly agenda and upcoming events which you may be attending. There is a message function allowing you to connect with other members (I am 2663 so I assume that at the time of writing that is how many users iZoca has) and you can also search for individual members.

So one of the initial main priorities is to join a group and get to know some of them. However the vast majority of the groups at the moment are US-focussed and this means for a UK member it is, at the moment, not going to help me connect with other folks from Britain.

To try and establish some new friends, I tried searching for other UK members – however, you can only search by name, title or company at this stage, so an option to find members by location would be a nice addition.

I like the UI, it’s very easy to navigate and Intuitive to use – thumbs up from me on that one. Aesthetically I think it could be developed a little further, but I must emphasise that iZoca is still in that Alpha stage. A really cool feature is the ability to get your iZoca calendar on your iPhone, into Microsoft Outlook 2007, your Yahoo and Google calendars as well as on your Blackberry.

You can keep up to date with iZoca on their blog, and I’ll keep you updated with any newsworthy updates.

I like the concept and the thinking behind iZoca, what we need to see from the team now is some investment in some new features – what about some Twitter integration for example – and a development of the way the portal looks.

Good stuff so far.

Stuff I’ve Shared on Twitter 27.09.09

I thought it might be useful to keep track of some of the cool things I’ve shared on Twitter each week and re-share them on a Sunday. If you’re anything like me, Sunday is the perfect day to take time over reading new blogs and interesting articles you just don’t get the time to during the week. So, without further a do…

Debate: Can You Still Build a Profitable Blog?
New Labour: from spin to social?
The Wisdom of the Crowds?
Enough Already About Charging For Content: How To Make The Free Model Work
Why the Lily Allen Story is Important
Social media is key to attracting graduate marketers
Five innovations in news journalism, thanks to the web
Stop the PR pitch madness
No Locks No Gates
Proof! Mobile microbloggers are boring…

Economist Did You Know

The Economist’s “Did You Know” video is full of great fact and snippets about the digital landscape. After reading this post on Mashable, I just had to share!

Tweetportal

Tweetportal is one of the latest in a long line of Twitter news aggregators which aims to pull together the most popular tweets shared by users of the service.

The portal has a simple layout with the main screen split into six sections covering world news, business, sport (although very little is UK-related), technology, music and television.

The layout is very simple, and looks very Lycos-ish, and despite this the site still takes a while to load up, even in Chrome. Tweetportal is currently in beta, so i’m expecting a raft of upgrades and new features soon.

What is interesting here is that there is obviously an opportunity for these services to appeal to Twitter users who are not familiar with the main sites such as Tweetmeme or Twazzup, and I think that they will be monetisable when they are swallowed up by larger portals such as MSN or AOL.

I think then we will see the real value of the likes of Tweetportal to everyday users, who are becoming accustomed to getting their news in 140 characters or less. For users who are using other resources to get their news, Tweetportal is not groundbreaking and is certainly not providing anything new, but to the layman, this is a useful service.

I’d like to see a fresher aesthetic, with perhaps an option to break down news by geography – reading about NFL, NBA and Baseball really does nothing for a Watford supporting F1 watching golfing type.

A nice start, but I expect to see more in the future.

Some Random Cool Stuff I’ve Recently Found

As the title says, here’s some cool stuff i’ve found recently through no fault of my own:

Zakta – cool new search engine I found via Jason Falls.
The Arts Desk – awesome art news site
xkcd – wicked web comic which provided me with the picture you see above
Brand New – London-centric social media networking event blog
Web Ecology Project – all about the sicence of online interaction
Linus In Hats – tumblog about a cat and different hats :-) via Sarah
Red Jotter – All about design and making stuff work better
Bulletproof – all about brand crises

Anything you guys would like to share?

Twitter Trending Topics are no longer relevant

Twitter Trending Topics have often been seen as the best way to guage what the mood is right here, right now, in the land of Twitter. Be they Michael Jackson, Iran Election, or Mrs. Slocombe’s Pussy, the rise of the popular keyword has been significant.

The importance of the Trending Topics sidebar too has grown. If a brand can get their name or product to trend, hey presto, promotion, for free, in front of millions of eyeballs.

This has led to many brands and many people gaming the system – look at the Moonfruit scenario – and this means that, for the most part, Trending Topics do not necessarily reflect the true nature of the main topics of conversation on Twitter.

This means that they are no longer relevant. A waste of space which does nothing but promote oft-repeated hashtags, which are largely nonsensical to the end user. The end user does however, like Trending Topics, so they can get that snapshot of what is important at any one time.

What I’d like to see is localised Trending Topics, made up from individual user’s followers and followees. You have 100 followers and 100 followees who are not into the NBA for example, but do watch English Premiership football. Your Trending Topics will include relevant tidbits about the English Premiership, because the Topics are taken from your followers not the mass, but not the latest basketball game because it is not relevant to you, despite it being a Twitter-wide Trending Topic.

This would make conversations more relevant to each user, encourage users to find other users with similar interests and help to prevent brands and spammers from gaming the Trending Topic system.

Yes, this may be initially difficult to implement due to API calls and such, but, for Twitter to grow they have to find ways of keeping the platform free from spam and relevant to its users. By helping users to make their experience more personal they can do both of these in one swoop.

Top Ten blogs: Social Media Measurement

How we measure social media ROI is the hot topic in comunications at the minute. What metrics can we use, what new ideas can we develop, and my particular favouritedo we even need to measure ROI?

I thought I’d collate this after reading and commenting on this post by Mike Litman got my brain swhirling.

Here’s ten of my favourite posts discussing social media ROI, there’s some classics, and some newer pieces too:

1) Social Media Measurement: Dashboards vs GPS
2) What Will Replace the Almighty Page View?
3) Perhaps Social Media Measurement Shouldn’t Matter
4) Social Media ROI – a financially sound method
5) You just cannot shoe-horn metrics into Social Media
6) The Business Problems With Social Media ROI
7) Enough With Social Media ROI, Already
8) Social Media ROI is about Conversation not Numbers
9) Social media ROI: is it worth waiting for?
10) Social Media ROI: Dell’s $3m on Twitter and Four Better Examples

What posts have given you food for thought?

Video of the Week: Serena Williams

Loads of brands want to get that big ‘viral’ hit, you know, where they make a shoddy product placement video and then millions of people watch it.

Here’s two examples of videos that fly around the Internet, and the reason this has happened? They’re famous people causing a stir. Yes, they’re not branded, but my point here is that people wnat to share funny stuff, not brand-led three minute videos. Look at the Downfall meme for example…

Anyway, here’s Serena Williams throwing a strop:

Spotify: Daniel Ek’s Glasshouse Chat

Spotify’s Daniel Ek last night confirmed that Spotify is considering introducing different price points and that the percentage of premium members is not yet in double digits, and that 80% of Spotify users have stopped file sharing.

I was invited by Mauricio Samayoa and Sylvia Tan to attend Pop Idols, an event hosted by Glasshouse, with Spotify founder Daniel Ek taking part in a cosy chat, at London’s plush Royal College of Physicians. I spent the evening in the most amiable company of Mr. Michael Litman, live tweeting on the #glasshouse hashtag.

Mr. EK started by saying that getting Spotify off the ground was “all about drive and commitment” and advised the entrepreneurs: “don’t listen to what the public think,” although the “most important thing is the consumer”. He said that he had “no previous experience in the music industry” and that “Spotify is a consolation prize to not being a rock star”.

Daniel confirmed to the enraptured audience that the main limit to growth is the competition, which is piracy, not iTunes, and that the next challenge facing the Swedish start up is to get users to share their music effectively. Saying that music is the most sociable type of culture and that it “transcends cultures, demographic barriers,” Spotify want to “encourage developers to create tools around Spotify to share music” rather than replace them, taking a leaf out of Twitter’s book.

And on the subject of Twitter, Mr. Ek said that they have “learnt more from Twitter than any other service” and how amazed he was that on Twitter, Spotify users respond to questions, and that he doesn’t have to answer directly – an important popint for all brands considering social media and unsure of the power of third party involvement and advocates.

It is interesting to look at Daniel Ek’s values in a wider scope. He said that music sharing “must be legal and compensate the artist,” and that “once we’ve found the artists are making money, then we’ll look at different content”. He said that the end goal is to be the platform between the artist and the fans, and wanted to confirm that user data is not used yet, but that it is “definitely something we want to use to engage with brands”.

Richard Trenholm from CNET asked about the relationship between Spotify and the major labels, and if they would look to introduce more independent artists into their roster. Daniel replied by saying “cutting out major labels is not the way to go, but we do want to work with independent artists”, an interesting potential development for young up and coming bands.

Spotify have considered introducing different price points, and in 5-10 years, their revenue will be mainly subscription based with perhaps to a “60/40″ split to advertising. Being typically coy about exact figures, he said Spotify “chose to grow quicker, rather than be profitable”, and when asked about PR, he confirmed that they have only ever issued 4 press releases and that “all marketing budget goes towards the product”

Daniel Ek pointed to the future with three things that Spotify fans could look forward to:

Status updates
Integration with other social services
Letting artists interact with these other services to know who’s listening to their music

Exciting times indeed lie ahead for Spotify, but perhaps even more, and rightly so, for Spotify consumers. It is what the company wants, and that is a good sign for all.