Written on August 20, 2008 – 4:56 pm Mike Sheetal, Next Web WebTipr in Japan
The answer to that question seems to be a resounding yes going by the title of a new Japanese magazine called Shinkansen&Love. The Shinkansen (bullet train) is apparently now the way to see the big city, go shopping and find love.
It is actually a fashion-related magazine with accompanying stylish video minisite to show what a wonderful time you can have shopping in Tokyo. All sarcasm aside, the combination of intercity trains and love, while having its roots in some strong history (The Orient Express for example), is comical even for Japanese.
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Written on August 6, 2008 – 2:56 pm Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Google has launched a new tool that helps to gain insight in search terms, called - not surprisingly - Google Insights for Search. Google’s Trevor Claiborne wrote earlier today that the product was designed with the advertiser in mind:
It provides more flexibility and functionality for advertisers and marketers to understand search behavior, and adds some cool new features like a world heat map to graphically display search volume and regional interest.
Even though the service is aimed at people who have devoted their life to marketing, it doesn’t mean a blogger can’t play around with it as well. I thought of a nice search term, and - again not surprisingly, came up with the iPhone. And not just because an Apple story drives in clicks (somebody accused Om Malik of doing this).
Trinidad and Tobago and Hong Kong: iPhone countries
So here are some surprising facts:
The first time a fair amount of people searched for the shiny object was in September 2005. Were that some iPhone visionaries? Or a secret Apple team looking for similarities?
People from Hong Kong and Trinidad and Tobago hardly search for anything else but the iPhone.
Written on June 26, 2008 – 10:29 am Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
After a hectic day of moving to a new office, I found the time to check my a-list of RSS feeds. Checking those top blogs always gives me tons of inspiration - for example, I’ve now learned a new way of dealing with annoying readers. I’ll just tell them to get the hell out of here.
At least, that’s what Faceparty did - one of the UK’s oldest social networks. It’s a network with an attitude, trying to be exclusive by only allowing invitees to join. Why?
With our doors open to everyone, this site was attracting too many spammers, fakers, pervs, liars, haters, nobs, pedos, over-50’s-using-it-as-a-dating-site- cos-they-have-to-pay-for-match.com’s, and most of all… too many friggin’ moaners! We’d spend all day deleting them, but alas (aarrggghh!) they’d only return the next day. Not anymore… problem solved. Hooray!
However, if you’re not subscribed to this network, you can still browse around a bit. I’ve drawn one important conclusion: looks like you’re not allowed to wear a shirt on you profile picture.
Anyway, the Faceparty team organized some sort of “fancy dresses” competition last week and something went wrong there with handing out the prizes. Users thought they wouldn’t get them anymore and became pretty pissed of. So they started leaving messages like, “you should get your f*cking act together”. This caused some discomfort by Faceparty, and what did they do? They typed an angry message, shut down the site, and took off to listen to other animals at London Zoo. Seriously.
The site was down on Tuesday and my fellow European tech blogger Mike Butcher managed to make a screenshot. Here’s a part of it, see the whole pic on TechCrunch UK. Perfect marketing… I gotta say.
Written on June 14, 2008 – 12:02 pm Patrick de Laive, Internet entrepreneur and co-founder of Fleck
Two weeks ago I did an interview with Timothy Ferriss, author of the 4-hour work week in Greece during Greek Blogger camp. The book has sold over 500.000 copies and his blog is still attracting lots of visitors. What is even more impressive is that no (conventional) marketing was used to do so. He describes his marketing strategy in his book: he used the blogosphere to spread the word and to make this book a huge success.
Lets keep in mind that a great marketing strategy is not the key to success, it is a very important ingredient but in the end you need a good product, service or in this case a good story. That is what Timothy did, he wrote a compelling story and what also helps is that he is a really interesting guy.
You can tell that I’m not a journalist, but hey… we had fun. I like to share this open conversation and this beautiful location with you. Hope you don’t get sea sick…
Written on June 10, 2008 – 8:00 pm Joop Dorresteijn, Contributing editor
That is, if you like to be connected to the Internet all day, while enjoying the fastest connections in the world! Enter the hyper connected society, with an astounding 90 percent of the country connected with 3G and a nation wide coverage of a South Korean version of Wimax.
How and why did South Korea become an overlord in Internet speed? In short; the South Korean government introduced a number of policy instruments to stimulate technological learning, aimed to strengthen international competitiveness of the economy. The government launched a five-year plan to create a ubiquitous networked world in 1995, meaning that the country developed a stunning 1.5 billion dollar wireless network to stimulate the use of the Internet.
Today, South Korea is the most connected country on earth, but the funny thing is that we hardly hear anything about Korea’s web scene. This made us curious about what websites are popular over there, and if Korea has a web 2.0 scene. To find that out, we reviewed the three visited websites in Korea and we interviewed Chang W. Kim, Korean web 2.0 enthusiast and initiator of the Open Web Asia ‘08 conference.
Written on May 31, 2008 – 3:38 pm Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Doing nothing and getting more traffic sounds like a typical spam promise, right? Well, most of the times it is. But now I need you to get past this prejudice for once - just for once! - to look with me at Scoutle. This Dutch start-up helps you to attract more visitors by just installing a simple widget - a so-called Stage - on your blog. And the best thing is.., these new visitors are probably really interested in what you have to say. Sounds almost too good to be true, so let’s take a closer look.
A Scoutle Stage
Scoutle works as follows: after you’ve installed the Stage on your blog, the service sends out a Scout - a personal webcrawler. This scout “walks through the Internet”. The more visitors you have, the more sites your scout will cover. Its goal is to find other scouts of which some might come from bloggers who have similar interests and profiles. If this happens, you’ll be notified so that you can get in touch with them. When both parties agree on a connection, they can see each others contacts. The result is a new network of bloggers who all have similar interests. They’ll probably start reading each others blogs and send out some trackbacks. So eventually, everybody gets more traffic.
The idea is really good, particularly because bloggers can just focus on creating content while some automatic Scout is looking for possible blog soul mates. When a match is made, they can enjoy each others readings. Almost a perfect execution of modern social networking.
But there’s one danger to it. Bloggers might install the Stage and send out a scout just to gain more traffic. This is not the best attitude for your users. They install the service and wait for their number of visitors to skyrocket. If this doesn’t happen quickly, they might quit the service. That’s why Scoutle may be better off with promoting itself as a service to find valuable blog contacts.
I’m going to give Scoutle a shot, and see if I’ll meet some interesting people these coming weeks. Founder Godfried van Loo told me he is eager for some feedback, so leave a comment if you have anything to add. If you’d excuse me now, I have to instruct a scout to find me some new blog friends.
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 4, 2008 – 10:42 am Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Keeping track of blogs like The Museum of Modern Betas and KillerStartUps sometimes drives me nuts. How many new start-ups could there possibly be? Everyday, another fifty seem to launch. So obviously, when you’re building a start-up of your own, getting attention is vital.
And this is the point where Lauren Nash from Sososher corrects me. She thinks “a big percentage of the success of a web start-up, among many others, is based on traffic.” Her start-up is at the beginning stages of design and construction. Nash: “We thought rather than do a Beta or Soft launch, we would start to generate traffic before the website has actually been launched.”
So she and the rest of the team created one fancy page that certainly creates high expectations.
The news reporter desk includes all kinds of gimmicks, focused on two things: impress you with eye-candy and persuade you to sign up to a newsletter or social network group. We don’t know anything yet, only that this English start-up will “change the way you shop online”. But it MUST be something cool right?
So although there’s still nothing going on here, I’ve posted this article to inspire other start-ups out there. Find ways to stand out, it absolutely works. If you asked a Next Web conference attendee which presenting start-up they can remember, he or she would probably mention Soocial. Why? Because they created a hilarious campaign around lost-glory star David Hasselhof. That’s how easy it can be. I’m sure you can mention another example?
Written on March 29, 2008 – 12:08 pm Mike Sheetal, Next Web WebTipr in Japan
I have written before about how QRcodes are a great way to access websites on mobile phones and how they are already commonplace in Japan. They are used in advertising and in everyday services that allow mobile access.
Cabal recently blogged about another method for locating websites in Japan. The method shows a search box with the search term inside that will help you locate the website in lieu of a URL. Of course this implies you should go home and type this term into your favorite search engine to locate the website.
This system only works if you have the top search result position or the top advertising position on that keyword, but I am guessing these companies have made sure at least that they bought the keyword out so they appear as the top paid search result on all the major search platforms. The thinking is that people can remember a keyword easier than a URL. From doing a quick ask-around of Japanese friends, it seems that most find this advertising annoying and unclear. I am not a fan of it either.
Another method that seems to have a quite high representation in Japan and hasn’t been talked about in western press that much is the menu navigation method.
The Menu Navigation Method
This method of getting people to your website is also aimed at mobile users. Entering URLs on a mobile phones can be time consuming and frustrating, so many advertisers are looking at ways to get users to their pages in simple ways that involve scrolling and clicking rather than typing.
This method is based around one of the sad realities of the Japanese mobile web. Most traffic on the mobile web is funneled through the landing pages of the major carriers (DoCoMo, AU and Softbank). It is changing slowly but it is still the case that most people use these pages just as many PC web users use Yahoo, Google or other portal pages to find their content.
This is an example from the ANA website showing the navigation paths from each of the three major carrier topages. NB. DoCoMo uses iMode, AU uses EZWeb and Softbank uses Yahoo Keitai.
Using this established familiarity with this portal page navigation, a lot of advertising replaces the URL with a path of navigation from the top portal page from the major carriers. The carriers are obviously happy because it keeps people in “their world” as long as possible.
More important though, they also charge money for portal listings. This process allows them to filter for “approved” content and control the economics which is fast moving towards free for connectivity on the mobile phone. As connectivity charges go down, total advertising and listing revenues are growing.
The main flaw to this method is the difficulty in remembering the navigation steps, sometimes there are up to 8 pages to click through before you get where you are going. The negative effects of this are limited by the usage case which usually has the advertising appearing in locations where you can refer to the navigation path while entering in your mobile phone. Places such as magazines, train platforms and PC sites are common locations to see them.
The Menu Navigation Method looks to be here for a while, but only as long as the carriers control the navigation pathways. Once people start to break out from the major portals, you may see the use of this technique drop, but if history is anything to go by, the Japanese people will keep to their safe portals for a while yet.
Written on March 13, 2008 – 11:54 am Reinout te Brake, online gaming expert
Hey you, yes, you! You are responsible for that huge buzz about online casual games! Since you are playing online games everywhere, whenever and so many times, you were helping in the past years to get a whole industry started. Do you actually know the term “casual games”, “ingame advertising”, “return on investment” and “venture capital”? We do. We, as in the online casual gaming industry. We are building games to please you as a player and make money of it. We try to understand your behavior in every way so we can develop specific games for men, women, boys and girls. Strategy games, role playing games, multiplayer games, arcade games and many more. You just have to choose or did we already know what you would choose?!
The online casual gaming industry has grown the last years significantly because more and more sites are offering games to the public at large. Not only you will find these games on specific games portals like Miniclip, GamesGames, and Pogo, but you will find more of these games in social communities like for example Facebook.com. Every day millions of games are being played online and therefore lots of companies did start to develop (often flash-based) games. These companies are located all over the globe, from China to USA, from Holland to India.
So I ask you just take a moment to think about it. What kind of games do you like? Where do you normally go to online to find these games? Do you (want to) pay for games or do you accept advertising around these games? All of these questions went already through the heads of those smart game developers and their marketing teams. They figured that these games are interesting marketing tools. You probably consider them just as nice playable games, but this industry is building on knowledge and experience on your behavior when it comes down to playing games online. (more…)
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The online casual gaming industry has grown the last years significantly because more and more sites are offering games to the public at large. Not only you will find these games on specific games portals like 
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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. (
