It’s how you feel

The Guardian are carrying a video of Jon Mitchel, UK sales director for Spotify (the free music streaming service), who says that later this year they aim to introduce mood-targeted advertising.

Targeting by mood is so much more powerful than by simply targeting by demographics. Your mood dictates what you’re likely to be intrested in and what you’re likely to be not interested. People are multi-faceted. They like different things, and want different things at different times. What’s been difficult so far is working out what they might be interested in and when.

That’s why I like Ifeel (by Andy Whitlock). It’s a user generated google maps mash-up that shows you places to go and things to do based on your mood. Filtering by mood is a very powerful way to get at what you really want. Much more interesting than a guidebook.

Now all advertisers and brands need to do is to start thinking more contextually about all the times, places and touch points when they’re likely to make the best connection with people and then try and target them there, rather than aiming at all ABC1 women over 50 who live in the home counties. The brands that crack this will be the winners of the future.

Bringing the town hall into the digital age

The 5th Summit of the Americas (a regional diplomatic conference for the Americas, surprisingly) is using a digital town hall  (on the howcast platform) to connect with citizens across the Americas. People can submit questions for Hilary Clinton to ask in a live video cast, follow the negotiations live via video streams, as well as reading blogs and following tweets.

So far, so good. I think the idea of connecting ordinary citizens with a diplomatic event that can feel very removed from their everyday lives is commendable. I think the execution lets it down.

What we’re getting are the same old ideas for participation, over and over again. Instead of just typing questions for Hillary, how about using the wisdom of the crowd through a Wiki to set some of the agenda for the politicians (they are supposed to be democratically elected, after all). Or what about bringing the citizen into the conference through holding live citizen participation forums, which contribute to and influence the political debate?

By focusing on the tools, the US State deparment (who is behind this) are missing the point of what the tools enable: democratic participantion. It would have been nice if they could have made some of these things happen.

On the up side, this sort of thing has many applications beyond politics: how about running e-conferences, government departments running digital seminars/lectures to disseminate the latest knowledge, charities creating a platform for widely-dispersed beneficiaries to come together to access services, or a small organisation to hold an agm? On these smaller-scale levels, greater participation by the general public is much more achieveable.

Perfect pitch

Hugh Jackman is using twitter to “auction” a $100k donation to charity. People have to convince him, in 140 characters or less, why their charity of choice is worthy of the money.

I do feel this is a bit popularist and not exactly the researched and considered way that we’d all like to see people making their decisions about donations. It also fails to promote a commitment to a cause - focusing instead on a one-off, attention-seeking kind of approach. But I suppose if it reaches to a new audience then that’s not a bad thing.

—UPDATE—

Charity:water have moved really quickly, getting children in Ethiopia to hold up signs to Hugh, asking for the money. They then posted the picture on twitter.

Good tweet

Came across this good twitter feed from Wildlife SOS India.

I think it’s good because:

• It’s from the field
• It’s from a field worker – you actually get to hear the voice of someone who’s at the coal face, i.e. it’s got a personality
• It’s lively and written passionately
• It’s updated frequently – they’re busy, they don’t need to stop to tell me about the need, I can read it in almost every post
• it’s teaching me about something I didn’t know about before – i.e. I’m engaged.

I think most charities can learn a lot from this. Twitter isn’t just another way to broadcast your latest press release or organisational line. It’s social media. You need to use it to tell a story and that story has to involve people – in the narration or the subject matter or both. Charities have no greater stories than what happens every day in the front line. Twitter lets you uncover these hidden gems, as long as you give the right person the twitter account.

The long-tail of giving

Social Actions is an aggregator which brings together thousands of charitable actions (from signing a petition to giving money) in one place through the power of search. The aim is to go beyond the larger charities, reaching right down to small causes and niche interests.

This is a classic aggregator, which is exposing the long-tail of causes, giving and campaigning. Places like this make it easier to find things to do that really interest people and fulfil their needs. This is taking power away from “hit” charities and putting it in the hands of smaller organisations.

They’ve even released a widget which brings up the most relevant actions depending on the content of the web page that it is situated on.

However, they could improve it even further by developing recommendations based on what you have done, along with showing what the most popular actions are for certain search terms. This will really help the niche grow.

Hat tip to Bryan Miller

BakerTweet

I love this from digital agency Poke. It’s a little machine that they’ve build for their local bakery. When freshly-baked deliciousness is ready, staff just have to twist a dial, press a button and then a message is published to twitter - Letting everyone know that freshly baked bread and cakes are ready for buying.

A really excellent application of the technology.

More from Iain Tait.