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On Tuesday I spent the day at the Being Digital Mashup conference. It was a really interesting and insightful day - although there were way too many pitches crammed into the programme.

For those of you that didn’t attend, I’ve put together a summary of the key predictions from the event, outlining what is going to happen within digital marketing over the next 5 years:

• Media fragmentation and the decline of mass audiences will continue as there will be constant shifts in the way consumers live their lives, but this should be seen as a positive instead of a negative. After all, ad spend can be reduced through advertising to smaller fragmented audiences, as there is less money wasted on irrelevant audiences. Advertisers will need to create innovative and targeted ‘marketing pieces’ for their consumers, reaching them via their niche channels.
• Although it is often thought that young people watch less TV than they used to, research shows that there has been a 10% increase in the time that 16-24 year olds spend watching TV each day (since 1997 their daily viewing has increased from 1.61 hours to 1.77) and this is likely to remain constant.
• The penetration of mobile internet is currently at 30%, but with continued promotion from the iPhone and other key players in the mobile industry, this is going to see huge growth.
• Most sites will have an element of social networking or online community in the near future, as consumers continue to want this functionality.
• Online shopping is not going to take over or replace offline retail. Research has proven that consumers like being able to use a combination of online, store and call centre when shopping, and when given this option to shop across multiple channels, consumers exhibit a higher degree of loyalty – their average relationship ‘lifetime’ with the brand is 2 ½ times greater which is very valuable. As a result, the future will see online and retail work hand-in-hand.

However, the two areas that I think are going to have the greatest significance over the next five years are branded content and location. Predictions for these topics are:

• Branded content is going to be huge over the next five years and brands are likely to benefit hugely from being associated with entertaining or relevant content, as indicated by Nigel Conway from Nestle. Their annual advertising budget currently stands at around £5bn, of which £3.5bn is spent on TV advertising. However, Nigel believes that in 7 years time, this £3.5bn will be spent on branded content. Research has shown that branded content is the most popular of all advertising formats, with 67% of all consumers finding it acceptable or valuable.
• Location is going to play a major part over the next few years, as GPS and mobile internet become more widespread. We all know how to find things on a map if we have the postcode, and with GPS we will all know where people are located - but the key question is how do marketers use this data to add real value to consumers? Many companies are trying to create 3D search interfaces and immersive environments for consumers but at the moment they are too expensive and very difficult to develop, and despite all efforts the interfaces are really hard to use.

My prediction is that whoever can create a user friendly, and ultimately useful and valuable location mashup for consumers will be much much richer in the next five years.

As you can see, the countdown is finally over and our new website is now live! This is just the beta version, so there will be a lot more content and some really cool features coming soon!

Have a look at our new portfolio section, which shows you a selection of the projects that we have worked on - we now have client quotes and pulled out stats for all of our case studies. We also have API’s, social bookmarking and much more, so have a look around.

The most important thing for us though is the site’s new visual design and our new neoco branding. It’s very different, but its very ‘us’

Let us know what you think…

http://www.techipedia.com/2007/6-ideas-for-viral-content

This article was written back in Oct 2007, but it is still relevant to how to create successful viral content today. The article uses one of its own tips - lists - to outline 6 ideas on how to build top viral content.

In brief, these top 6 tips are:

1. Lists - easily digestable & contain good, useful information
2. Quizzes - fun to take & results are easy to share and compare with friends
3. Interactive video - customised videos work really well
4. Images - great at evoking user emotion, especially shock or humour
5. Tools - users like tools that make their life easier
6. Teaching users how to do something - people generally like to learn new  & cool things

However, the full article is definitely worth a read, and has some useful articles.

Although obviously no viral campaign is going to work without creativity behind each of these ideas.

iGliss has just relaunched its redesigned beta, labelled as a ‘media content management service’.

We all know that often there are just too many steps to sharing media online with friends - but iGliss provides one convenient place for you to share all your favorite items including videos, pictures and blog posts.

With iGliss, you can choose to do the traditional uploading ‘by hand’, or you can download their PC content manager, which locates your media for you and automatically uploads it - basically taking all of the human interaction out of it for you. Once your media is uploaded, other users can search the site for your content, using it’s tags and descriptions, and then share it with even more people.

As well as sharing your own content, you can share videos from YouTube and RSS feeds - basically anything that can be shared on the web can be shared here - great for people who do a lot of sharing!

Yesterday, we found out that Flickr now adds video! So, it’s a multimedia sharing site, that involves both photos and videos.

You’ll need to have a Pro account for video sharing, and clips up to 150MB can be uploaded. And, as with photos, there are a number of privacy settings to take advantage of, licensing, as well as tagging and geotagging capabilities.

We think that space limitations are going to be a major problem for many users, along with the alternative of free YouTube. But, given that Flickr’s brand is a sharing site for serious amateurs, perhaps YouTube won’t hinder Flickr’s entrance into the video space too much?

Webware has reported that Flickr will be scaling up uploaded content - an appealing necessity for its existing user base. With the growing interest in quality videos from an individual user standpoint, especially on the mobile front, this could be the perfect time for Flickr to finally make its move into video.

TwitPic is a really cool service that lets you easily add photos to your Twitter stream. In its latest release it has added mobile support, a new interface design, a real-time Google map mashup, plus a couple of features that bring additional utility to Twitter and the TwitPic service, including tagging, geotagging, and RSS feeds. These help with the self-broadcasting end of the life streaming spectrum, and they also help to better organize the huge amount of content on Twitter. If only pulling an RSS feed directly from Twitter was so easy.

Tagging and geotagging are not currently available on TwitPic yet, but they will soon become an integral part of the TwitPic service. These new features, along with the TwitPic API, show the ways in which TwitPic is aiding the Twitter economy.

One thought is how will this integrate with the Facebook Twitter API?

Since last week, Benn has been raving on about the BBC iPlayer on his iPhone, but what is it?…

BBC’s iPlayer is their online on-demand TV service, which allows users to download or stream any BBC content which has been broadcast during the last 7 days, and watch it on their computers - or in Benn’s case his iPhone. As it’s the BBC, the iPlayer is free to use. It uses peer-to-peer technology for the download service, so that content can be downloaded from the nearest point in the network and not always directly from BBC servers.

The iPlayer first came out in summer 2007 but it didn’t have its proper launch until Christmas Day 2007. Within the first 7 weeks of the launch, 17 million programmes were streamed or downloaded and recently over 500,000 programmes were streamed or downloaded in one day! In January, around 2.2 million people used the iPlayer.

The iPlayer website has recently had a facelift to add extra functionality - the 10 most popular programmes, ‘Last Chance’ for programmes about to expire, and ‘Recently Added’, which is updated every 10 minutes! We think that the iPlayer really shows how hard the BBC is working to build up its online and digital presence. Over the past year the BBC has signed deals with IBM, YouTube and Apple’s iTunes and it has recently announced that it will be collaborating with ITV and Channel 4 on a shared on-demand TV service called Kangaroo.

However, since its release there have been a couple of issues with the iPlayer. When the download version of iPlayer initially came out, it only worked on Microsoft Windows XP and many people were unhappy about it excluding a significant number of people not using XP. In response, the BBC has consistently said it wants to offer a multiplatform iPlayer and has already made the download version compatible with Vista, with a Mac version promised by the end of 2008. The BBC also has plans to broaden access even further, making it available on the Apple iPhone and iPod Touch.

There has also been concern expressed from broadband networks, about the sheer volume of traffic that iPlayer will ultimately generate. Tiscali suggested that content producers like the BBC should be made to pay to fund broadband network upgrades to prevent it from crippling them and Ofcom has said there is the possibility that the ISP-content provider business model may need to change in the future to fund the huge growth in digital content.