Real Fresh TV | Specialists in Social Commerce and Social Media Marketing » Audience Analytics

Study Of Social Media Usage Amongst FTSE 100 Continues To Gain Coverage

Chi-chi Ekweozor — Sat, 30 Aug 2008 16:01:36 +0000

Our study of social media usage amongst FTSE 100 companies continues to attract readers.

It has been added to social bookmarking site StumbleUpon and internet marketing social site Sphinn and was recently picked up by social media industry blog, Social Media Today.

Yesterday it was covered by SinoTech Media, one of China’s largest digital marketing agencies in a blog post reviewing the surging mainstream interest in social media.

Here’s what they had to say:

“Real Fresh TV has been conducting a study of social media usage amongst FTSE 100 companies in the UK. The website has some interesting information about the largest UK companies and their adoption of social media. I will continue to review and give commentary once the findings become clearer.”– SinoTech Media

And I’ll continue to post in-depth analysis here!

Still not sure social media is for your business? Read this entertaining article on what happened to US mobile phone network Sprint when a disgruntled customer-to-be blogged about them last month.

Someone trying to sign up to Sprint’s network had a bad experience and promptly blogged about it. The twist in the tale is in the comments at the end of the article. To be fair, it’s amazing how quickly Sprint reacted.

For those that remain sceptical on the business value of social media, here’s an illuminating article that explains today’s rapid adoption of social media using the organisational change models familiar to business.

Look out for next week’s announcement about our forthcoming Social Media Starter Course.

Here’s a quick poll in anticipation.

Which of these would you want covered at a social media starter course?

Image Credit: Nomensa

There are Only Two Kinds of Online Advertising: Relevant Advertising and Spam

Chi-chi Ekweozor — Wed, 05 Dec 2007 03:05:19 +0000

Alex Iskold over on popular technology blog, Read/WriteWeb has just published a thought-provoking piece on the myth of contextual advertising on social networks like Facebook.

By ‘contextual’ advertising, he is referring to advertising that is served to the user based on information the advertiser has about him or her.

He does not think the contextual ‘Social Ads’ on Facebook work very well because of “[Facebook’s] lack of understanding of its users.”

His argument is that Facebook does not know enough about him to serve relevant ads (or does not appear to use the information it knows about him effectively enough to serve relevant ads) because much of its information is unstructured.

Now, I’m no computer scientist but I beg to differ.

The information he has willingly entered on his Facebook profile is stored against variables that are associated with each relevant interest (pardon the pun) .

Should he change his ‘Hometown’, for example, he would simply be updating the information stored in a ‘structured’ database on a Facebook server somewhere. That information can, and will be used by advertisers who want to advertise to Facebook users from his Hometown, for example.

The point he is overlooking is context. And here’s where the title of this post becomes relevant.

All forms of mass media work well in the medium they are deployed in because advertisers learn to use the medium in the context they are most effective in.

So, one is accustomed to seeing glossy perfume ads in glossy magazines and hearing overly chirpy voiceovers on the radio during rush hour.

The problem with contextual advertising based on friend-to-friend referrals on an online social network is that the context is all wrong.

This is something that Alex points out himself:

In addition to the ads in the sidebar, Facebook is now showing advertising in the newsfeed. I understand that they want to monetize the site, but this is just really confusing. We have been trained that the news feed shows updates from our friends. This is the place that we are directed to first each time we log in to the site, and having ads there simply creates a bad user experience.

This is the real issue.

If I was going to monetize a fast growing social network on which users willing proffer huge amounts of information about their day-to-day lives using advertising, I would focus on making the ads relevant to the user first.

I wouldn’t add information about their friend’s purchases and other Social Ads in the news (or activity) feed unless this information was relevant to the user’s interests because this just increases the likelihood of introducing non-user friendly spam.

If it is not relevant, it is no longer advertising, no matter how much it might look like it.

Contextual advertising is still largely untried and untested online because it is difficult to manage the information required to do it effectively.

Now I am no social networking expert but I have a theory that may be worth exploring. Let me explain.

On a really popular social network, the problem of delivering relevant ads to users based on their interest becomes increasingly more difficult the more information you have.

It is not as easy as simply delivering targeted ads to users who express a preference for a particular interest, say, ‘Sci-fi movies’, for example.

The advertiser you are selling that (user) information to will want formidable proof that delivering ads to just to those users on the social network will be worth their investment.

To do so, the social network will need to have systems in place that actively interact with (or monitor) the information those users provide about ‘Sci-fi movies’, for example, to ensure that it can to run suitable ads against it.

When you think about all the different interests listed on user profiles on the major social networks, from sports and music to fashion and film, it becomes apparent that monetizing user data can become a real pain in the whatsit….

There is simply no way the controlling social network can effectively manage all that data on its own.

The most sensible way to manage this inherent complexity is to invite external application developers to create interesting applications that provide ‘user interest interaction and monitoring engines’ for the various types of users of the network.

This is why May’s announcement of the F8 platform was such a smart move by Facebook.

On its own it was a first step in the direction of providing useful apps for Facebook users to interact with.

Taken together with the move towards monetizing the site using advertising, it provided a way to harness all that user information and control some of that complexity.

Unfortunately, not much focus seems to be going into ensuring that the F8 platform is used to deliver ads that are relevant to the user on Facebook and I can understand why.

Offering all 50 million plus users of the network as potentially limitless advertising inventory to marketers is much easier.

Tracking their activities on partner sites and feeding that information back into Facebook to form the basis of ‘social ads’ that can be monetized through clicks by trusted friends is a much simpler proposition, on face value.

However, this has the potential to do the following:

Disrupt the user experience on the site
Reduce the ROI of the social ads themselves.

The latter point is critical. The real test of social ads and social advertising systems built on referrals through friends on social networks is whether they actually work. This is what the advertisers have signed up for, at the end of the day.

I’m not sure they do.

I will explain why:

A ‘referral’, trusted or otherwise, is quite different from a ‘recommendation’.

Here are the two words defined by dictionary.reference.com:

Referral
tr.
1. To direct to a source for help or information:
2. To direct the attention of

Recommendation
tr.
1. To praise or commend (one) to another as being worthy or desirable; endorse: recommended him for the job; recommended a car instead of an SUV.
2. To make (the possessor, as of an attribute) attractive or acceptable: Honesty recommends any person.

Most referrals work on the basis that there is something to be gained from the referring action.

Recommendations are different, however. They are often made based on prior knowledge of what a user has done or his or her ‘interests’.

Recommendation systems, like the one perfected by Amazon, are often more credible because they combine prior knowledge about the user with relevant information for the user.

‘Trusted referral’ advertising on Facebook on the other hand, seems to offer no incentive to the user other than the opportunity to ‘share’ information.

As the title says, there are only two forms of advertising on the web: relevant advertising and spam.

Are you starting to see why some of this blind ‘sharing’ of information might not be such good idea?

If I were monetizing a fast growing social network, I would actively scan the horizon of popular applications on the network and find ways of partnering with the application developers to sell advertising within their apps.

After all, that way I would be learning more about my users and delivering advertising that is relevant to most of them at the same time.

This decision would take a fair bit of thought to hammer out a working business model but it would ultimately be the best option for the users in the long run because they would not feel like they were being manipulated in any way.

And they would receive a lot less spam.

You can argue that to make social ads work, advertisers should provide users with an incentive to take part in recommendations but that’s the topic of another blog post.

What do you think?

Would you like more spam with your advertising if it came from trusted friends, or less?

Or is it all information that you’d rather have blocked using some sort of social spam filter?

Your thoughts in the comments….

Social Media Giants YouTube and Wikipedia crack list of Top 10 UK Online Brands

Chi-chi Ekweozor — Thu, 29 Nov 2007 12:39:49 +0000

Social media brands YouTube and Wikipedia have entered Nielsen Online’s list of the top 10 most popular internet brands in the UK, at the expense of Real and AOL.

Here’s the two page report from Nielsen Online which also reports that Facebook accounts for the two of the fastest growing online brands in the UK: RockYou! and Slide.

RockYou! and Slide are heavily used by Facebookers – particularly 18-24 year old women – to organise photo slideshows, according to Nielsen Online.

This shouldn’t come as a surprise.

YouTube is now the UK’s fourth most popular commercial media brand.

According to Nielsen Online, its audience has grown 84% over the last year to almost 10 million unique users – almost one in every three UK users online use YouTube.

There is also a strong performance from Facebook which has grown a massive 1,647%, from less than half a million UK users to almost eight million, in just 12 months.

In addition, a report released yesterday by market research firm, E-consultancy, shows that more than 50% of UK companies plan to use social networks as part of their customer engagement strategy.

The survey found that around 90% of UK companies now consider online to be ‘essential’ to their business, with community and social media near the top of their list of priorities.

Smart move, especially as 85.6% of UK business have Internet access.

The E-consultancy report is a clear indication that UK companies are keenly aware that online marketing will increasingly focus on customer engagement.

We are witnessing a move from ‘loud’, interruption-based advertising to more subtle customer engagement in online marketing.

Oddly enough, it all feels quite natural, despite the fact that social networking is only just becoming mainstream; Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp bought MySpace less than three years ago.

Let me explain.

With broadband access effectively ubiquitous in the UK, companies no longer need to display loud flashing banner ads across portal pages to grab a user’s attention.

Back in the bad old days of dial up, this method was one of the handful of options for online marketers and was a perfect fit for the purpose.

After all, the user was online to accomplish a specific task, be it sending an email to a friend or colleague or researching a purchase.

Your only option as an advertiser was to lock your ad in their line-of-sight and fire as many impressions as possible if they ever approached a web property you were advertising on.

That user is now online for up to 7 hours a week in the UK, leisurely watching videos and chatting with friends, both real and virtual, and it’s now all about getting him or her to engage with your brand and products or service.

Why?

Because getting them engaged with your brand in some way is probably the most effective way to ensure you are front of mind when they decide to make a purchase.

That user now has phenomenal choice in terms of what to buy and see and do online.

Smart advertisers and marketers recognise the importance of making it as easy as possible for today’s net savvy user to reach them online.

It can be as simple as ensuring they can download a brand-sponsored podcast featuring their favourite band.

Or making sure the profile page of a brand’s product on the user’s favourite social network is updated with information the user might find useful and interesting.

Though the technology may be new and confusing, the methods for creating stellar customer engagement online do not differ that much from the methods used offline.

It’s all about seeking out opportunities to make emotional connections with consumers online.

Creating stellar branded content that delivers stellar experiences is an excellent way to start.

Your customers will willingly engage with you and advocate your brand and products.

You just need to give them more of a reason to want to.

Over to you, dear reader…

What do you think?

Would you be pre-disposed (I love that word) to using a brand’s product or service if they offered you some content or information of value on a social network?

It’s a cheeky question…

Bring on your cheeky answers in the comments below.

Future of Social Advertising: Potential Pitfalls of Using Social Media

Chi-chi Ekweozor — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 03:39:36 +0000

This article is the fourth in a series of articles exploring the future of social advertising.

Click on the ‘Social Advertising’ tag to read earlier posts/articles.

The last post presented the notion of branded content as “the next big thing in social media” and put forward the proposition that brands are better off looking at engaging directly with consumers over branded content on the major social networking sites than creating standalone social media sites if they are promoting new products or services.

In this post, I expand on the potential pitfalls involved with engaging directly with consumers online using social advertising.

I’d like to take this opportunity to say that this is an evolving series of articles and that we welcome reader input in all forms; through comments at the end of each article or via our online contact form. Get involved.

First, it is worth noting that whilst I have been referring to social advertising in previous posts/articles, I am actually referring to the growing trend of ‘advertising using social media’. Did I just say “the growing trend of ‘advertising using social media’”?

Yes.

I can sense that sceptical eyebrow, arched to precision and delivered over the internets, right here in Manchester, UK.

Yes, I am referring to “the growing trend of ‘advertising using social media’”.

I am specifically referring to a growing realisation that marketers are indeed taking social media advertising seriously. Check out this fascinating conference being held in London in early 2008 and organised by a major UK conference organiser:

UPDATE: Details for the 2008 conference are no longer available. Here’s info on the 2009 conference.

The blurb for some of the speaker panels:

Blogging: PR Dream Or PR Nightmare? Determine The Potentials And Pitfalls Of Blogs
“Can you involve your product in the consumer conversations that blogs enable while keeping track of your commentators as the blogosphere continues to grow in size?

Can you use blogs as an early warning mechanism and counter any negativity at its source, or will a loss of control leave you too open to criticism?

Can you increase transparency and foster trust through blogging or will a lack of factual accuracy coupled with journalists’ responsibilities lead to misinformation?”

Monologue Has Given Way To Dialogue: What Is Social Networking And How Can You Use It In Your PR Campaigns?
“Facebook, Second Life, Bebo: how can social networking bring you closer to your consumers?

Modernise your PR approach: integrate social networking into your overall strategy and place your brand at the forefront of new technology.

Clarify audience demographics: learn about your audience to ensure precision targeting and generate useful feedback.

Getting the mix right: reveal what works and what doesn’t to ensure that you are spending your PR budget in the right way to secure the highest return on your time and investment.”

Confirmed speakers: representatives from MySpace, Bebo, Dell, Walt Disney and more.

As you can see, it is scheduled for late January 2008, and no, I have not been paid a penny to promote or endorse it in any way.

I am not sure I will be attending either, we found out about it too late in the budgeting scheme of things.

I am highlighting it here just to make you aware that social media campaigns are definitely being considered by major and active brand advertisers in the UK.

Now, onto the potential pitfalls.

The thing with social media is that you are damned if you do (it) and damned if you don’t.

The power afforded the average consumer to promote or denigrate your brand online is undeniable and is only going to increase with the inevitable march towards ubiquitous, high speed broadband internet access around the world. Look out for wireless access via smartphones like Apple’s iPhone to significantly magnify this trend.

A cautionary word to Brand Advertisers:

“Information about your brand and about your product or service is going to be passed around online using electronic ‘word-of-mouse’, fuelled by the average consumer’s growing obsession with connecting and communicating with others online.

Get used to it.”

The unfortunate thing is that news travel fast and bad news travel faster.

That enthusiastic customer advocating your brand to a handful of friends on his blog can just as easily trash it mercilessly in the un-moderated, anything goes, environment of Facebook (or MySpace or Bebo or any other social networking site).

The problem is illustrated with Canadian brewer Molson’s recent decision to pull a Facebook promotion after complaints that they promote binge drinking. They ran a photo contest targeting 19-24 year old college students on Facebook, if you haven’t heard by now. Molson Coors is the third-largest U.S. brewer behind Anheuser-Busch Cos. and SABMiller Plc. (Thanks to the Marketing Pilgrim blog for incredibly detailed insights on this).

Now, the campaign, based largely around encouraging students to post pictures of themselves out drinking with their friends on Facebook in order to win an all-expenses paid trip to Cancun, Mexico, is arguably ‘lame’ as our North American readers might put it. That’s what a commenter called ‘C C from Canada‘ thinks anyway.

And, you could argue that the decision to pull it now is a classic case of bad publicity being better than none and you would be agreeing with a ‘Jason Young from digital identityville, Canada’ but the fact remains:

The company pulled the campaign on Friday afternoon, a week earlier than planned, largely because of published criticism and complaints it received from university administrators and student groups.

Here’s the conundrum for social media marketers that lies at the core of the issue:

Molson’s target audience may have thought the campaign was ‘innovative’ to some degree but their opinion was secondary in importance to that of the larger web community who cried foul over ‘a brewer using social media to target consumers in an ‘unethical manner’’:

According to Joe MacDonald, dean of students at St. Francis Xavier University and one of the administrators who complained to Molson. “It’s cheap marketing,” he said. “I’m concerned about Molson’s lack of contrition.”

Molson have responded quite candidly, however, and pulled the promotion:

“We promote responsible choices and wanted to be pro-active in responding to concerns expressed from a number of different audiences,” the company says in a message on its Facebook page.”

The company also maintains its own blog detailing its corporate social responsibility initiatives, something that can only be applauded.

Much of the content above comes in the post and online responses to the post published in an article in The Globe and Mail, Canada’s #1 national newspaper. Its parent company, CTVglobemedia Inc., owns CTV, Canada’s #1 television network.

The article goes on to say that Molson is still intent on running social media campaigns:

Despite its setback, Molson will look to expand its social media marketing, and already has developed some blogs and other online initiatives, Mr. Devins [a vice-president at Molson Coors Brewing Co.] said.

“We need to be communicating with our consumers because that’s where our consumers are communicating among themselves. … We need to make sure we’re in that relevant channel.”

I couldn’t agree more.

So, I guess this recent ‘controversy surrounding Facebook’ places social media marketers in the position of having to design and develop social media campaigns implemented primarily within Facebook with a real understanding of their potential impact on the wider web community.

That goes without saying, surely.

Well… nothing ever does.

The point that follows is directed at social media marketers planning on promoting brands on the fastest growing social network on the planet:

check that your social media campaign can work trouble free on *any* social networking site, under the public gaze of the wider web community and stand up to the scrutiny of key campaign stakeholders (like the target audience) well *before* going ahead and deploying it on any social network.

This will come as a bit of a blow to the emergent social media consultancy community and is a bitter pill for any social media company to swallow and I fully empathise with Facebook at this point.

However, already online reactions to Molson’s pulled Facebook campaign show that social media marketers (and key stakeholders in the relevant social media campaign – like the target audience) are certainly active online and are using word-of-mouse tools much faster than anticipated.

The disruptive potential of social media is that it is about encouraging natural and largely positive word-of-mouth recommendations online.

The flip side is that this cannot be controlled and never will.

I will end on a word of advice.

Social media marketers (and agencies involved with advising on social media marketing campaigns) need to focus on crafting social media promotions based on the ethic of reciprocity: Do to others what you would have them do to you.

On a practical note, at the very basic level, ensure that your brands have a compelling story to tell consumers online. This story could be a fascinating facet of your history that you decide to share online or, admittedly more conveniently, some branded content that is designed to grab the attention of your target demographic and encourage them to interact with you.

Don’t just throw out a campaign asking consumers to give you sordid details of their night out last Friday.

This also means ensuring that social media campaigns designed to appeal to ‘the 16-24 demographic on a youth heavy, music focused social network’ can also be run anywhere online without fear of incurring any potentially scary side effects of nasty bad press. People are potentially more conservative when making decisions based on social marketing promotional campaigns online, despite what proponents of social networks and social media will tell you. ;o)

Here at Real Fresh TV we are focused on developing social media campaigns that place the consumer at the heart of the campaign’s proposition.

We have a background in customer service provision in a variety of industries and bring that to bear in developing ‘advanced online engagement and promotional campaigns’ using social media.

OK that may look like a shameless plug but this is as good a time as any to point out our stance in matters like this.

If someone points out that a social media campaign put together by Real Fresh TV contains something a consumer may register a complaint about, either in the present or in future, potentially because it affects the Data Protection rights or potential future employment prospects of the consumer, for instance, it will never be put forward to the sponsoring company.

Better to be safe than sorry. It’s our reputation on the line as well.

What are your thoughts?

Was it fair for Molson to pull their photo contest promotion from Facebook?

What do you think are the major pitfalls for brands looking to advertise on emerging social advertising platforms Facebook and on other social networks?

MySpace has recently announced plans to launch its own social advertising styled on Facebook’s controversial Beacon system within the next six months.

What do you think? Will it draw as much ire as Facebook Beacon?

Please share your opinions and thoughts in the comments below.

Image credit: MasterNewMedia.org

What Makes An Online Giveaway Fair Anyway?

Chi-chi Ekweozor — Mon, 12 Nov 2007 15:29:47 +0000

The second extension of the deadline for the first British iPhone Giveaway to midnight on Friday 16th November has inspired some interesting comments including this one which suggested that extending the deadline and implementing a fairer entry system would damage the competition’s credibility.

My response to that is that the competition is still open and the prize still up for grabs.

The deadline extension does not penalise anyone who has already entered.

This is an important point.

Due to the problems with negative comment voting, most of the entries in the competition have only received ‘negative votes’ so far which suggests that people are intentionally voting down entries. Hopefully, enabling only positive votes for comments should right this.

Ben then pointed out that popular tech websites like TechCrunch select winners randomly or using an ‘Editor Picks’ type process.

Fair comment.

However, tech sites like Engadget and TechCrunch are both hugely popular for their great coverage of tech related and web 2.0 related news. Both may well choose to reward their very large readership by running regular giveaways in which a winner is selected randomly.

That would certainly be the most efficient way of selecting a giveaway winner on Engadget, the top listed blog on the web, Technorati, blog popularity tracker.

Both comments got me thinking, though.

My objective for running this iPhone giveaway is to find the best suggestion for a TV show to watch on an iPhone.

I would prefer to select the winner based on readers’ votes for each entry.

However, I’m not sure how workable this solution would be in practice as voters are not required to login first to vote.

So… to conclude, I’m moving ahead with enabling only positive voting of comments and keeping a close eye on developments. It’ll be interesting to see what effect this has on entries.

Like I said to Ben, this giveaway has already taken more time than I had allocated for it.

It’s been a very interesting ride so far though.

Thanks again to all that have entered. It is still on…

What are your thoughts on the deadline extension?

Your comments welcomed as always.

TV, video & movie content consumption online almost doubles in the UK

Chi-chi Ekweozor — Tue, 06 Nov 2007 19:17:20 +0000

Neilsen Online, the new name for services previously marketed under the Nielsen//NetRatings and Nielsen BuzzMetrics brands) has just published a report on online video consumption in the UK.

Here are the significant points (excerpted from the report which you can download here).

My comments in italics.

Almost 21 million Britons visited a TV, video or movie-related website in Sept 07 – a 28% increase in visitors since Sept 06.

The TV/Video/Movie sector online is now visited by 63% of Britons online; up from 55% in Sept 06 – a growth rate of 15%.

Alex Burmaster, Internet Analyst, Nielsen Online, comments “Britons are displaying an increasingly significant appetite for supplementing their viewing habits online. Whether it’s additional content relating to a particular TV programme or actually watching episodes or videos through their computer, we are starting to see a significant spread of entertainment consumption from the so-called ‘lean-back’ method of TV to the ‘lean-forward’ method of the PC.”

Our free iPhone competition designed to find out which TVs shows consumers in the UK are interested in watching on YouTube, Bebo and on the iPhone in the UK is perfectly timed then!

YouTube is the most popular and most engaging TV, video or movie site being visited by 9.4 million Britons who spend a combined total of almost half a billion minutes on the site

This is probably obvious to anyone who works in an open plan office in the UK. ;o)

The top ten contain four major broadcasters, two social media video sites, two movie information sites and two sites for general TV content.

It’s worth downloading the 3 page report to read the analysis of the Top 10 UK Video sites in terms of Unique UK Audience, Active UK Reach and Total UK Minutes.

I’ve reproduced the column showing the sites in terms of Total UK Minutes below.

10 most popular TV, Video & Movie Sites* by UK audience – September 2007

It’s fascinating to note that the combined time spent online on both ITV and Channel 4′s websites, the two largest commercial TV broadcasters in the UK, is exactly the same as the time spent on Sky, the satellite broadcaster (41 million minutes).

However, in terms of audience engagement, all three are dwarfed by YouTube: 499 million UK minutes were spent on YouTube between September 2006 and September 2007.

US chat show queen, Oprah recognises the power of YouTube and launched her own channel last week.

In her video message to YouTube users, she professes respect for the persistence of Russell, the skateboarding dog and other stars of YouTube, including Jud Laipply of of the Evolution of Dance video.

Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, founders of YouTube and hip hop mogul P. Diddy, who recently ran a contest to find an assistant on YouTube will all be guests on this week’s episode of The Oprah Winfrey Show during which the formal announcement of the partnership with YouTube will be made.

To conclude, Alex Burmaster of Nielsen Online says:
“The fact that YouTube is the most popular site in this sector shows the power of social media as an entertainment form – and the threat or opportunity it poses for traditional media players, depending on your point view.

It’s also interesting to note that TV-links.co.uk – the ninth most popular site and, amongst the top ten, second only to YouTube in terms of total audience time – has now been closed after claims it was illegally providing links to download film content and TV shows.

Whilst the legality of the site is in question, the appetite that people have for watching this type of content online isn’t. It is an example of the potential audiences that await media content owners – particularly when it comes to back catalogues – if they can just get their content up and available online.

I couldn’t have put it better myself.

There’s some interesting commentary on the report over on PaidContent.org with UK editor, Robert Andrews pointing out how YouTube is gobbling up UK eyeballs.

Over to you…

What do you think about the implictaions of online video content consumption doubling in a single year?

What’s your opinion on what TV companies should be doing in the UK?

What shouldn’t they do?

Share your thoughts in the comments.

Photo credit: www.executivecaddie.com

Day 2 of the First British iPhone Giveaway

Chi-chi Ekweozor — Tue, 06 Nov 2007 16:30:07 +0000

We are already getting some very interesting entries in the competition to give away a UK iPhone on Friday.

JC, the first entrant would like to “watch Dr Who on his iPhone”. Interesting.

I would like to watch anything by Sir Richard Attenborough, come to think of it.

Wonder if the BBC is listening.

The Blue Planet nature series was awesome. Watching that on long car/coach/train/plane journeys would be an absolute joy…

There’s also a request for the Father Ted, IT crowd and other Channel 4 gems. I hear you, Toby Spanton. There’s more entries pouring in…

Portable TV, on the go. It appears ordinary people in the UK would like it. Very much.

This competition is an open platform to find out what sort of shows people would like to watch on an iPhone in the UK.

Enter now and you could win one.

Alternatively, tell us what you think about the idea itself

Defining Online Video Audience Analytics

Chi-chi Ekweozor — Sat, 03 Nov 2007 22:14:04 +0000

Server side site visitor detection software has linked clicks to user actions since the advent of the web.

Online video advertising is therefore intrinsically measurable, it is argued.

Well, the jury is out on that.

It is true that online video delivery platforms have the potential of forcing the accountability of unique web visitor statistics to the highly subjective TV viewing figure analysis used in traditional broadcast TV.

But how can they? How does it work?

This is just a teaser. Look forward to posts exploring audience analytics in the highly accountable medium of the web.

Would you find this interesting?

Let us know in the comments.