Agora Media Group Innovation Blog

PRNewsWire reports that MTV Networks acquired Social Express, a social gaming development company, marking the company’s first entry into the social gaming space.

The company will create severeal games based on Nickelodeon and MTV shows and characters.

Chairman and CEO of MTV Networks, Judy McGrath, says:

“Social gaming is one of the biggest drivers of the explosive growth in social media – it’s fun, it’s engaging, and it’s shareable,” said Judy McGrath, Chairman and CEO of MTV Networks.  ”Social Express brings us strong experience and know-how in this burgeoning space, which we’ll supercharge with the IP and scale of Nickelodeon and other MTV Networks brands to create great new social gaming experiences for our fans and cool tools for independent developers as well.”

On a conceptual level, it will be interesting to learn if MTV Networks will head towards transmedia entertainment concepts, incorporating television programs, websites and social games to create a full-fledged integral storytelling.
Each medium will serve another purpose and like McGrath already states, Social gaming is fun and engaging, two ingredients which could add a new experience and layer to existing or new concepts.

Transmedia concepts do exists and there are great examples, for instance the Happiness Factory by Coca Cola.
The Happiness Factory is a virtual world of characters living inside a vending machine. The series lives across multiple channels, including commercials, interactive video games, and a musical soundtrack that features a variety of artists. The series provides Coca-Cola with additional revenue streams, and customers with a fun brand experience.

MTV Networks could do similar concepts based on Nickelodeon and MTV shows and characters, taking it a step further, taking the engagement of the viewers of MTV a step further.

What do you think of the potential MTV Networks has with Social Gaming?
Is the Entertainment industry perfect for transmedia concepts?

We are looking to take Social Gaming to TV via Social TV platform – think Mafia Wars, Farm Town, and even Second Life on TV.
We have developed and successfully broadcast Social TV in Europe bypassing the remote using telephony 2.0 (mobile and landline), advanced IVR and business logic servers, realtime 3D along with web integration.

We need partners. We need financial backing to redevelop the project.

… where viewers can create a virtual character, pilot it in the TV environment, meet, compete, play and even talk to other viewers/competitors via phone.

What is the Cross Media Social Platform (CMSP)?

The TV market is ‘on the move’ – competition is growing and digital channels via ISP’s and IPTV providers are now crashing through what was once the walled fortress of broadcast television. Interactive content and social media are the buzz and broadcasters are looking for both innovation and revenue generation models that fall outside of the traditional advertising box of the past. And the need for all types of content is growing exponentially, of which one is created by users themselves.

The Cross Media Social Platform is a unique product that not only offers a business model that encompasses current and widely spread advertising revenue – it also has added value by offering broadcasters the opportunity to earn money via telephony (Premium Rate Numbers and Premium SMS) via freemium modelling, as well as web and phone subscription models – where users can augment their profiles and characters on the web for TV and the web.

We created an interactive, virtual world on both television and the Internet that envelops social networking, community, user generated content, competition, and entertainment. And we are interested in developing this further with principles who were involved in the previous project. And it works on both standard broadcast or terrestrial TV as well as IPTV, Satellite, Cable etc.

See video of work we did in the past at Youtube

Visuals of the Cross Media Social Platform (CMSP)

Below you will find a basic CMSP architecture demo and a couple of screenshots.

It evens goes further, technology developments are evolving, partners have released an API enabling developers to create unified communications (telephone, cellular text message, instant message (Jabber, AIM, Yahoo, MSN) applications using traditional document-based web development flow. This sort of technology can be implemented in the Cross Media Social Platform, adapting to the needs and ways of nowadays communication.

Why Agora Media?

We have the experience and know-how, without having to invent the wheel and exploit this competitive advantage, we can respond very fast and accurate to the concretizing needs of the Social TV/Social Media/converging Media community and industry! We have a vast network of 2.0, cross media and technology pioneers, working closely with them to stay on top of trends and developments which will enhance the Cross Media Social Platform.

Why now?

The interest in Social TV is rising, the television landscape is changing, permanently. Media consumption is converging and increasingly socializing. More and more experiments, products and services are initiated and developed to meet these changes. Being on top of these trends and offering new digital cross media experiences to your target audiences and putting you permanently on the map!

Feel free to contact us if interested or wish to receive more information.

The Online Strategy encompasses those elements of the business- and marketing strategy that must be employed to contribute efficiently and effectively to its goals.

As for all strategies, the Online Strategy should consider the brand, the target audience, products & services and the positioning of the brand. ( read also The Content – Context Diarchy to understand the relation between offer and context in the online landscape )
Be it on an overarching level or on execution level (see the three parts below), consistency is key to achieve brand recognition.
It’s tempting to divert from this focus because the Internet offers lots of possibilities which can be applied, but not neccesarily relevant and this non-relevancy might cause a distanciation of the target audience.

The online strategy for your business can be divided in three main fundaments:
* Website Strategy
* Internet Strategy
* Social Strategy
read more

A couple of days ago I was watching a show of a Dutch stand-up comedian, who at one point began talking about the excessive choice consumers are given nowadays. He gave the example of having many kinds of toothpaste, which burdens him, because a person becomes indecisive, whilst the only thing he wants is to have clean teeth and a toothpaste which takes care of that.
When he talked about this topic, sociologist Barry Schwartz came to my mind which wrote the book “The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less” on customer behavior. In the book he explains that choice overload can lead to decision-making paralysis. Choice is the hallmark of individual freedom and does fit the New Consumer which I referred to in The Axiom of Self-Segmentation , a type of person that seeks authenticity, is individualistic, independent and well-informed.

To give you a short insight in the overwhelming offer, here a part from chapter one “Let’s go shopping” of Schwartz’s book:

A Day at the Supermarket

Scanning the shelves of my local supermarket, recently, I found 85 different varieties andbrands of crackers. As I read the packages, I discovered that some brands had sodium, othersdidn’t. Some were fat-free, others weren’t. They came in big boxes and small ones. They camein normal size and bite size. There were mundane saltines and exotic and expensive imports.

My neighborhood supermarket is not a particularly large store, and yet next to the crackerswere 285 varieties of cookies. Among chocolate chip cookies, there were 21 options. Among“goldfish” (I don’t know whether to count them as cookies or crackers), there were 20 different varieties to choose from. Across the aisle were juices—13 “sports drinks,” 65 “box drinks” for kids, 85 other flavors andbrands of juices, and 75 iced teas and adult drinks. I could get these tea drinks sweetened(sugar or artificial sweetener), lemoned, and flavored. My neighborhood supermarket is not a particularly large store, and yet next to the crackers, were 285 varieties of cookies.
Next, in the snack aisle, there were 95 options in all—chips (taco and potato, ridged and flat, flavored and unflavored, salted and unsalted, high fat, low fat, no fat), pretzels, and the like, including a dozen varieties of “Pringles.” Nearby was seltzer, no doubt to wash down thesnacks. Bubbled water was displayed in at least 15 flavors.

In the pharmaceutical aisles, I found 61 varieties of sun tan oil and sunblock, and 80 differentpain relievers—aspirin, acetaminophen, ibuprofin, 350 milligrams or 500 milligrams, caplets, capsules, and tablets, coated or uncoated. There were 40 options for toothpaste, 150 lipsticks, 75 eyeliners and 90 colors of nail polish from one brand alone. There were 116 kindsof skin cream, and 360 types of shampoo, conditioner, gel, and mousse. Next to them were90 different cold remedies and decongestants. Finally, there was dental floss. Waxed andunwaxed, flavored and unflavored, offered in a variety of thicknesses.
[...]
A typical supermarket carries more than 30,000 items. That’s a lot to choose from. And morethan 20,000 new products hit the shelves every year, almost all of them doomed to failure.

These figures to refer to American supermarkets, but I do think these scenarios count for many other countries as well.

The ambiguous title of this article is The Paradox of Choice 2.0 , the aforementioned supermarket example is analog, if we move such a scenario to the digital world, we get a squared choice overload.
First because online stores like Amazon.com have many titles along the Long Tail terms. Secondly, global is the new local, besides the increased choice related to the books themselves, the amount of e-stores from where a customer can order, has increased drastically as well.
The second explenation of the title is the fact that the Social Web adds a new layer to shopping -opinions- which only will add more to the decision-making paralysis next to the online characteristic.
Due to collaborative filtering, recommendations, opinions, ratings and implicit and explicit personalization tools, customers are getting quality assistance in their decision-making which paradoxically is relevant to their search, but at the same time could be paralyzing in achieving their goal.
Think of Amazon.com which recommends other books in the same category, recommends books which are bought together with a certain book, shows the actual % of people which in the end bought that particular book and the % of people who did buy another one. Next to the recommendations, the large amount of reviews and rating does add value to being well-informed, but does make it harder to decide.

There is a fine balance that C-level and seniors need to find in terms of portfolio, product lines, offer and effects on customer behavior like this, responsibility needs to be taken towards customers in regulating the choice overload.
This is referred to as strategic clarity ,this goes hand in hand with More is Less, where these kind of decisions are not made by businesses and therefore will be emotionally and psychologically detrimental.
Too much is not and won’t be a success factor business-wise and customers will ignore all that is too much, from either perspective too much doesn’t get each of the two further.

How will the two entities -advancing technologies/business and online customer behavior- behave and react to each other now and in the future when the freedom of choice is most probably squared once again?
Will the effect of too much choice reach the top which will negatively impact business or shall strategic clarity diffuse more amongst businesses and prove its importancy?

Information asymmetry is as an unequality in information, knowledge, expertise, network -etc-, which creates an imbalance where a company can make better decisions than another company.

Asymmetric information imbalances have always been competitive advantages -in any way expressed- for companies’ existences.
The Web’s transparency is changing this for good and worse.

The increasing tranparency of the Web certainly has challenges for companies to keep its advantages over others. Publicly available information which is accessible to anyone is the prime challenge.
The information widely available applicates to competitive intelligence, information on products and services, information on brands, information with regard to target groups, which all can be used to enhance -both- the internal and external processes of businesses.
Web 2.0 forces companies to be open, to be transparent towards the market and the players/customers. If this isn’t done, the consequences might be even worse, due to the co-involvement consumers demand in transactions.

Though, paradoxically, if processes are enhanced and adapted to the opportunities that Web 2.0 offers, bigger asymmetric information imbalance  and competitive advantages can be created!
Think of all the information available on social networks, bookmarking sites, Wikipedia’s, blogs, microblogs which can be used to create or enhance business and further increase the asymmetry. Networks of people or companies always have existed which added value to the competitive advantage of business, but the easier access to all this information is being facilitated by the Web, forcing companies to extract intelligence from it easier, faster and with more accuracy.

Because information is out in the open, companies need to be able to learn and adapt faster than their competitors. This is the skill that can be mastered. Learning curves will follow each other quicker, advantages don’t remain as long anymore and information overload is all around us.
Overcome the challenges of the Web’s transparency but at the same way, alter the company to new levels with help of its transparency.

How do you think the Web can contribute to information asymmetry?

Interesting video on the new Boxee beta release!

An interesting remark during the video was that Boxee is Open Source and opens up its platform for developers through their API’s.
This is great from a business point of perspective and for a market as Social TV, looking forward what third party developments will be.

What is your opinion on the opportunities of Boxee?

Below you’ll find the video, an image and information on the Boxee Box.
For further information check out the website of Boxee.

View the short introductory video by Google where it announces you can discover breaking news on the web with real-time updates from news, blogs and social networks! After Bing has introduced Twitter results in its search results, now it’s time for Google to show its abilities.

Finally, it was bound to happen that Google is displaying real-time results from microblogs, blogs and social networks, next to this news, Google announced as well partnerships with Facebook, Myspace to get real-time data and not to forget, the deal from October with Twitter.

What are the effects and implications of Google’s real-time search and what questions are being raised?
* Will SEO be expanded with optimizing tweets and other public data as well?
* Will all this real-time data be available in Google Analytics, the social media monitoring market will have a new worthy competitor?
* Is Google Search the right place for real-time data (in combination with ‘historic’ data)?
* Will users make use of Google as an aggregator more and more (kind of Friendfeed), or will they make use of each network because it’s more relevant contextually (Google in time will integrate that as well)?
* Will real-time efforts be mechanized just to make sure that people or companies rank high in the search results?
* If Google will prove its importance to real-time search, what about SPAM just to make sure that people or companies rank high in the search results?
* How will real-time results weigh against ‘normal’ search results?

When Google launches new tools, it almost always reshapes or at least shakes up the established Internet landscape.
This is not so bad, it keeps companies focused and it ignites creativity and innovation to come up with solutions for questions as the abovementioned.

If you were the devil’s advocate, what questions would you raise?

An interesting remark / point of perspective came up in one of the other Waves, where was debated that Internet cannot be a strategy because it should support the marketing strategy.

“In my opinion there is the marketing strategy, as defined by the classics like brand positioning, target segments, benefits of offer and experience. Internet consists of a series of touch points that should support that.
Some could be critical touch points that support the unique benefit, or just be touch points amongst the path that just need not to oppose the benefit. Customer needs comes first, then the positioning/ benefit, then the touch point analysis, that decides on the internet approach.”

I do find this an interesting theorem/point of perspective, what do you think?
Can the Internet be strategized or do you concur with the abovementioned?

Do discuss in Google Wave as well, below.

Social Media works, we’ve been deploying the Social Strategy for our own blog and content to prove and demonstrate its potential and effect on the company.

We have initiated the Agora Media Group blog at the end of August, two and a half months later, we have achieved a staggering growth in brand visibility and reach by the content we’ve written and our social media efforts to expose our content on relevant networks, social bookmarking sites, many articles have been picked up by other sites which further increases our brand portability.

I can assure you, we have not spend a single dime on paid advertising to get our word/thought-leadership out, we have invested heavily in our social media (architecture), even experiments with Google Wave are having effect on our brand and the way it’s perceived.

This has resulted in the following two figures which have been achieved in the short period we are live:

Traffic impact

SEO impact

Social Media will change the way companies will conduct business, will reach out, will engage with their target groups, do invest and explore the opportunities which lie ahead.
The abovementioned figures do point out to only one of the many aspects which Social Media has effect on and other examples will follow in the future to show the power of it.

Another announcement last week, which I received with enthausiasm, was the approval of the Mobile DTV Standard by the ATSC (Advanced Television Systems Committee). The press release can be read here.

The Mobile DTV Standard are technical specifications which enable broadcasters to offer new services to mobile and other handheld devices making use of their digital television transmissions (DTV).

Indeed a milestone in the evolution and convergence of digital television. Broadcasters will have a wider range of devices to their disposal to offer existing -but more important- new services to their customers.

New business models arising from the Mobile DTV standard, will revolve around the evolution of Social TV and its convergence. The Mobile DTV Standard enables the possibility of interactive television services which will mix television, mobile and Internet to create new content services/applications and evolve transactional television to the next level. The Standard utilizes the Internet Protocol which increases the role of terrestial broadcasting even more.

The location characterstic of mobile devices, in combination with the increasing centralized role it plays and the mobility of the modern human will prelude a further democratization of television, where smaller/local broadcasters can take their chance to break through to wider audiences without the conventional television business model and its specifications.

As quoted from the press release:

“This milestone ushers in the new era of digital television broadcasting, giving local TV stations and networks new opportunities to reach viewers on the go,” said Paul Karpowicz, NAB Television Board Chairman and President of Meredith Broadcast Group. “This will introduce the power of local broadcasting to a new generation of viewers and provide all-important emergency alert, local news and other programming to consumers across the nation.”

It would be great if the Mobile DTV Standard will be incorporated in popular smartphones in the near future so that these early adopters have the chance to experience the next step in digital television and in this ‘role’ enhancing the applications to smoothen mass adoption.