In this way Twitter is kind of like talkback radio – a live and constantly updated source of information. Yet it isn’t usually a passive or ambient experience to engage with Twitter. It requires the use of a computer, tablet, or smartphone usually. You can’t find out what’s happening on Twitter while you drive, in the same way you can have talkback radio on as you’re going.

But what if you could? Text to speech systems have come along way recently, and as far as my GPS unit goes, which certainly isn’t top of the line, it gets the pronunciation of most common words correct without sounding stilted. So I’m saying, what if there was a text-to-speech system for Twitter feeds?

It could do for information radio what MP3 players have done for music radio – allow each and every person to create their own personalized stream of audible information. Channels could be based on your entire Twitter feed, Twitter lists or hash tags. It could read out the contents of the actual tweet and the links they include, and if this included audio or video content, then it could play that too.

I’d love a system like this. What do you think?

If you haven’t been following Rupert’s thoughts on the iPad, here’s a very quick summary. Basically, Murdoch believes that the iPad is a magic and revolutionary device and it (and its media tablet competitors) has the ability to save the newspaper industry from its slow demise.

I think the media tablet genre does have the ability to do this. This is because it takes the experience of consuming content online, on a computer screen, and makes it as relaxing and comfortable as possible. An iPad user could flick their orientation switch to ‘lock’ and lay back in their easy chair or snuggle down in bed, all the while browsing the World Wide Web.

However, just because users can now do this, does not mean that this translates into people suddenly taking up newspaper reading again. The media tablet (of which the iPad is currently the most popular example) is a new medium, and with it comes a new model of consumption. I’ll illustrate what I mean by talking about two applications for the iPad, Press Reader and Flipboard.

Press Reader is a fantastic application for anyone who loves newspapers. Basically most major newspapers from around the world are available to be purchased as a one off or as part of a subscription and downloaded to the iPad on a daily basis.

Once downloaded, a user can read their favourite newspaper from cover to cover as if they were holding the printed edition in their hands. The application brings up articles in a nice reading overlay so even a person with the most precarious eye sight can easily read the newspaper’s text. For those that truly are blind, Press Reader will read out articles with the tap of a button.

The problem is that a newspaper is still a newspaper regardless of whether its been delivered to you rolled up with a plastic sheath on the outside or wirelessly to your media tablet. You have to flick through pages and pages of articles to get to the one you want. (How many times have you had this exact conversation in your life? ‘Oh I saw this interesting article in the paper this morning, I think it was on page 24, let me see if I can find it for you’…’Oh I’m sure it was on page 24 but I can’t find it, hang on I definitely remember it being on the right hand page’…(2 minutes later)…’Oh, here it is, it was on page 16′).

Contrast this to Flipboard. This application offers a very similar approach to Press Reader. It has a table of contents and pages of articles that a user can flick through. When they find the one they want, they can click on it to bring it up in a bigger window. The difference for the user is that they’ve essentially chosen the content themselves. Flipboard‘s sections are based on a user’s Facebook account, Twitter account, specific Twitter lists they have created, specific users on Twitter that they find interesting, or other sections of news content curated by Flipboard themselves. These curated sections appear to come mainly from blogs.

Flipboard‘s approach definitely suits the way I (and I imagine a lot of others consumers) would enjoy consuming content on the iPad. Its a relaxed experience of flipping through pages of articles rather than trawling through Twitter feeds or using an RSS reader to keep up with my favourite blogs. Yet at the same time, it’s my content so I’m not get anything I don’t want to see (and if I am, I can quickly remedy it).

Newspapers (and Mr Murdoch) could think about the lessons that the initial success of Flipboard should have shown to them, and either join Flipboard or come up with something similar. For example, I would love to be able to read the national affairs section of The Australian, along with their media coverage. I’m not particularly interested in the business section, although perhaps if there was an article that was to do with the media industry or mentioned an organisation I was interested in, then it would be filtered out for me. Then I’d combine this with the sports section from the Herald Sun.

This would be a way of reading news content online that I approve of, and one that I’d happily pay money for. So hopefully some newspaper proprietors cotton onto this idea of customisation and realise that users probably don’t want to pay for all their content because they’re not interested in reading it all. But they might be interested in some of it, and be quite prepared to pay for it

Customisation and sharing is what makes consuming media content on the web great. The iPad (and other media tablets) makes this experience more pleasurable, and more natural by largely bringing back the experience of reading. App stores make it easy to purchase content on these devices.

This idea then, of a customised newspaper that might take content from a number of titles within a stable or even titles from a number of different media proprietors doesn’t seem all that remarkable. It is surely only greed, in that proprietors like Rupert Murdoch think they can make people buy an entire newspaper online , that is stopping them from exploring this idea further.

Here you’ll find an overview of my PhD, as well as discussion of some of the issues that are arising from it. So please check it out.

In the meantime, New Media Mogul will be continuing to discuss more general issues to do with social media, digital media, technology etc. Despite being in the process of getting my PhD finished up, I’ll still try and blog as often as I can.

One of the ‘big two’ Australian supermarket chains operates an ancilliary petrol station in Balwyn in Melbourne where they provide regular grocery shoppers with 4c per litre off their petrol for purchases over $30. At this particular outlet, for at least the past three years, an eccentric young Irish man has worked there who has a unique customer service style, yet one that is appreciated by most of the petrol station’s customers.

Recently this man was enshrined through Facebook with a group page that featured people’s favourite quotes of his, images of him working in the petrol station and even his shift times so that if people so desired, they could get their petrol when he was working.

After having a couple of friends tell me about it, I was one of 536 people to join the group. Yet probably less than a week after joining, I got this message from the group’s creator:

at the request of [the supermarket chain], we have been asked to remove all photos and make the group private, or altug could lose his job. if he does lose his job, i think a good old public riot is in order.
we will have some new pictures up soon enough, but any of altug in his [supermarket chain] gear or in the store have to be removed.

stay in school and give my kind regards to the ghetto

The supermarket chain’s reaction seems quite inexplicable to me, as someone who has been studying the impact of social media for two years now.  Large companies generally have media and communication departments that adjudge publicity to be either brand enhancing or brand detracting. This was a free and wholly customer instigated publicity movement, surely the best kind.

The makeup of the group was mainly of people who were already regular or semi-regular customers of this particular petrol station, simply reflecting on the weird and wonderful experiences they had had of being served by this young Irish man. Sharing memories was likely to keep them coming back to the petrol station to see the individual, who by virtue of working there, was heavily associated with the supermarket chain.

Now this move has created some backlash against the supermarket chain, such as:

• [The supermarket chain] is good at spoiling some fun, it’s not fun spoiling goods

• Bloody [Supermarket chain], dont they realise that Balwyn [petrol station] & [the young Irish man] are institutions of the local area??

  Peace out…

• I dont know about [the supermarket chain]. This is the best free advertising the can get and is also wonderful customer feedback on staff. If he loses his job i’ll give hime one.

The last Facebook user makes an excellent point, it could have been great free advertising. And considering there are other petrol stations in the Balwyn area, including one run by the other major Australian supermarket chain, a viral campaign on Facebook (as the group looked like it was turning into) might have increased business for the petrol station.

This might have occurred if friends of the people joining the group had been curious about it, looked at the group, appreciated the humour and decided to visit that particular petrol station rather than one of the others in the area. Now the group has been deidentified and although people in the know (which obviously most members of the group are) will still know exactly what store the young Irish man works at, there is no opportunity to introduce new audiences to the individual or to his place of work.

There are a few reasons I can see why the supermarket chain might have made the decision that they did:

• Not being able to control their own branding and image. This is the reason why most organisations are shy about social media. Yet in this case the hijacking of the supermarket chain’s image by users on Facebook was a positive and almost entirely brand enhancing move. As I have identified earlier, their subsequent moves at stopping it have created a negative sentiment and have been brand detracting.
• The other reason I can see comes from an intimate knowledge of this supermarket chain, having worked for them on and off over nearly five years. They strongly emphasize a team environment (as most organizations in this sector do) and as such, they may not have wanted one individual to become bigger than the team or store itself.

My response to the second point above is that the young Irish man has been well known in the Balwyn area for several years, and the Facebook group was simply extending his fame into the online world.

Anyway, I am going to seek to have the supermarket chain read this blog post, and perhaps try and get some insight from them as to why they have taken their particular actions. So watch this space…

The iPhone changes this. Now I find myself instinctively reaching for it to do numerous online tasks that are now quicker and easier to accomplish using this smartphone. The iPhone is no flash in the pan, it’s heralded a whole new era of user experience on the mobile phone, with Microsoft’s Windows Mobile, Google’s Android and Nokia’s Symbian smart phone operating systems looking to catch up to the custom version of OSX found on the iPhone.

The interesting thing as far as this blog is concerned, is that as people make the transition that I have, and begin to prefer the user experience of a smart phone over a more traditional computer, what sort of possibilities this presents for media creation and interaction.

It has ramifications for the way that people interact with public spaces if their lives are going to become more dependent on these devices. It also means that entertainment that takes place within public spaces has to think about how smart mobile phones could be used to create a richer degree of interaction between the audience. It might be that a sophisticated approach to engaging smart phones translates into a sophisticated approach towards other new mediums.

I’ll keep watching  this evolving space and update you when I can!

Sport is after all a game, and there is no guarantee that a certain team will win week in and week out. They can only hope to recruit the right players and the right coaches, hope they are better prepared than their opposition, play an exciting style of game and go from there. But in the end it comes down to chance.

At present professional sporting clubs have very explicit interactions with their customers. Customers either see the team play at the ground, on television, or might interact with the club through their website. These are very structured interactions, and there’s a real separation between what the sporting club does in public and what they do behind closed doors.

There has to be this separation because image management is a huge issue for professional sporting organisations (both leagues like the AFL and individual clubs), but there could be a more subtle separation facilitated by social media that allowed a sports club or organisation to effectively manage its image while still making fans feel more included in the processes of the club.

Imagine if professional sporting clubs used Twitter. For example, Carlton could have tweeted before its recent NAB cup semi-final against Geelong, ‘Should we play Chris Judd this week?’ Although it would surely be inadvisable to take popular consensus over the opinion of professional coaches and other experts, it would make fans more included in the machinations of their club and potentially make it easier for professional sporting clubs to establish and maintain relationships with their customers (fans).

Interestingly, Ebbsfleet United has gone all the way with social media and made an offer to its customers that in exchange for owning a piece of the club they get to be involved in the day to day decisions, including picking the team.  The football club is a very minor one in the grand scheme of things, playing in a division that is four below the Premier League but interestingly after embracing this concept they have achieved their best ever result to date, winning the FA Trophy.

Ultimately, a tightly controlled interaction between professional sporting clubs and customers (fans) could make maintaining a relationship an easier process. With more insight into the running of the club, the emotional connection (if indeed it does exist) might be strengthened due to the customer feeling more important in the process of the club, and when times are tough, careful explanations and behind the scenes looks at why the club is performing badly may make fans more accepting of the inevitable slumps that every professional sporting club goes through.

There is surely an emotional core to sport that professional sporting organisations attempt to capitalise on in their marketing efforts. For one thing, it’s why a team like North Melbourne in the AFL has ‘Stay Troo’ as it’s membership drive slogan for 2009, a play on stay true and the club’s moniker, the Kangaroos. In other words the club is appealing to the loyalty of its supporters to buy memberships, even though it has now been ten years since the club won a premiership.

In a similar vein the Western Bulldogs membership slogan for 2009 is ‘Are you with me?’ a similar appeal to loyalty, pride and identification with the team. This is a team that has not won a premiership within the last 50 years, and in any other form of the entertainment industry that sport is nominally a part off, couldn’t hope to survive. It would be akin to a band failing to produce a new record in 50 years and continuing to tour with their old songs – eventually you’d think that their fans would dry up.

Instead they keep on turning out, suggesting that they have a deeper connection with the club that is not just based on winning games, winning premierships and value for money. The noted academic on sports matters, Richard Cashman, suggests that wrapped up in sport is a pervading sense of nationalism, because the way a nation plays sport can define both what it is and what it is not. Cashman cites Anderson when he says that nations aren’t necessarily physical, but can be imagined, and therefore the Western Bulldogs and North Melbourne can be defined as a nations.

Embodied in this feeling that Cashman describes is no doubt a sense of loyalty to this club – indeed he describes it as a ‘deep horizontal comradeship’ that involves a shared sense of history and values.

It’s clear that not everyone gets so embedded in a sporting club, and some professional sporting teams do come and go – clearly because they haven’t marketed themselves properly and have failed to form a strategic relationship with their customers in the manner I talked about in my last post. But perhaps over a longer period of time this changes and people become more deeply involved with their sporting teams, so that it’s no longer just a consumer relationship but an emotional one as well. To me this makes the marketing of professional sporting teams a different process to other entertainment products, and explains why clubs continue to play each week in the face of extended periods of poor performance.

Recently I’ve been considering the ways in which sport is marketed as part of my approach to the area of research I am pursuing. For while it is my ultimate aim to study the transition of professional sporting organisations into the new media landscape, marketing is such an integral part of what separates successful professional sporting organisations from those that are less so.

And indeed if sporting codes weren’t marketed correctly, there would be no media interest anyway, because there would be no customers (fans), and therefore no need for the media to disseminate information about sport.

Before I go into detail, what is starting to become apparent is that sport has unique properties (which I probably won’t go into fully in this posting, but instead the next) that make sporting teams attractive to customers (fans). And although professional sporting organisations still have to follow traditional approaches to marketing, there is an emotive aspect to sport that changes the dynamic between organisation and customer in this instance.

It also strikes me as apparent that there are ways that sporting organisations could use new media techniques to strengthen this relationship and make their marketing efforts more effective. I’ve more or less talked about this before but I will go into this further in a future post as well.

To explore some of what I mean about sport’s unique marketing properties I have paraphrased the following points on how to establish a strategic relationship between a customer and a company from the book, Leading Through Relationship Marketing by Richard Batterley.

In italics I will annotate his descriptions with how I think they relate to professional sporting organisations.

Section A to B

The prospect is unaware of the product or service or has never thought of opening a relationship with the company

Point B

The prospect sees some form of stimulation (say a press advertisement) and recognises the product or service may have some relevance for them and considers what a relationship with the company would bring them

How does a professional sporting team become relevant to a customer? Particularly a low performing team who has never achieved a sustained period of success. These types of teams still manage to attract customers who either attend matches or purchase season tickets. There must be a sense of tradition in following this team, or local pride, or empathy on some level that makes sport a unique marketing product.

Point B to C

The prospect’s expectation and anticipation is heightened as they consider their needs.

Point C

At this point the prospect realises the product or service offered might provide some value to them and they request further information.

While professional sporting teams tend to attract more customers during periods of success (Hawthorn has the most members of any Victorian AFL club this season after their premiership win), there are still nearly 20,000 people who have signed up as Melbourne members. Melbourne has endured a number of unsuccessful seasons in a row, and any other marketable product that had failed to deliver for so long would surely be finished by now.

Section C to D

Again expectation and anticipation increase the strength of the relationship while the prospect is waiting for the information they have requested.

Point D

This is when the prospect expected the information they requested to have arrived. If the company is responding to the initial invitation to enter a relationship they will have provided the information by this point. From here the relationship can take two alternative routes.

Here’s the good news track

Section D to E

Having received the information sought, and it meets their expectation, the potential customer is in a position to make a purchase decision. Part way through this section they cross the decision line ‘I will buy’.

What is a customer’s expectation of a professional sporting team? Is it to win, or to play the game with skill, or to play fairly? This is where sport really seems to become different to other marketable properties. A band whose concerts constantly failed to live up to expectation would be finished, yet a team that fails to win games over a sustained period of time can still expect to see people turning up to watch.

Point E

The relationship is cemented! The prospect buys! And now becomes a customer!

In sport the relationship can be cemented even when the product (sporting team) fails to live up to the buyer’s (fan’s) expectations.

Section E to F

In this section of the relationship the customer is enjoying the product or service they have decided to purchase and the strengths of the relationship is growing (assuming the product or service meets their expectations)

How does a professional sporting team meet expectations? Does it need to win a premiership to achieve this? Does it merely need to play fairly? What are fans expectations of sporting teams?

Point F

At this time in the relationship the new customer is so satisfied with the product and the supporting service they are receiving they become an advocate and start recommending the organisation and its products or services to others – so convinced are they that the organisation will deliver a similar level of relationship to their peers!

Do sporting fans ever engage in this sort of behaviour? I guess to an extent, but not in the same way that I might recommend that someone buys an Asus laptop or an iPod, or uses iTunes to manage their music collection. 

Now, the ‘other’ track!

Section D to G

The prospect still feels that they should have received the information they requested by now – but they haven’t. As a result, their expectation and enthusiasm for opening a relationship begins to slow down – not reverse yet, just slow down: recovery is still possible, but it will not be easy.

With bad marketing this can happen to sporting teams, but I think this is different to another sort of product. While it might mean that someone doesn’t worry about becoming a member of that club and buying a season ticket, it won’t stop them being a supporter of the club.

Point G

If the organisation doesn’t deliver the information by this point, the prospect’s initial expectation isn’t met and the gap between expectation and delivery creates frustration and strength of relationship begins to decline

Section G to H

Nothing has happened so the strength of the potential relationship is damaged and takes a negative turn. It is still recoverable – but only just, and it will take a lot of expensive follow up to save the prospect’s expectation of the relationship.

Section H to I

The rate at which the relationship is declining is increased and almost nothing can be done to recover the situation.

It would be interesting to know whether there are people who refuse to continue supporting a sporting team because of continued poor performances. Enthusiasm can wane for professional sporting teams but in my experience it is uncommon to hear about people refusing to support a particular team any longer. 

Point I

The point of no return! All is lost. The previously potential customer has crossed from feeling positive about the organisation and its products or services to a space where they actually begin to feel negative about them – contact may aggrevate the situation!

Section I to J

And now the situation is declining even further towards the relationship graveyard. The once prospect starts talking negatively to their peers about the organisation and becomes very cynical about failed promises.

There are many frustrated supporters of professional sporting teams, particularly of teams that perennially underachieve, however in my experience these fans continue to attend matches and will still be supporting the team if and when things finally turn around.  

Point J

Gone. Lost forever. The formerly potential customer has made the decision they will never buy from the organisation, no matter how good the products and services are. Best left well alone!

I’ve been involved in a side project that looks at the etiquette surrounding the use of media devices in public spaces. This grew out of some field work I was involved in, interviewing people face to face about the ways in which having a mobile phone aided their use of Melbourne’s public transport system.

Time and time again I would get to the end of the interviews, ask people for any further thoughts and have them ranting about the rudeness of people talking on their mobile phones whilst on the train or tram. So it seemed like something that was worth following up.

It’s something that now being taken seriously too. The Western Australian Public Transport Authority recently launched a campaign to gently remind commuters that they should be more considerate when using their mobile phone or iPod.

Our survey (which you are invited to take part in) aims to create a typology of what makes good and bad media etiquette. I’m also quite interested in looking at whether the experience for digital natives and digital non-natives is different; whether digital natives might be more tolerant towards the way in which others use their media devices, and whether this tolerance might be growing with younger members of Generation Y (of which I am one).

The other interesting thing here is that it is not as if many ‘non digital natives’ have grown up without media devices in public spaces; transistor radios and Walkmans have been in existence for many years.

I’ll post some of my analysis here when I get to it…

In the first place there was the spoken word and this was a time when sport was predominantly local and representative of a single community. The team was the mouthpiece of this community. This is where the preoccupation of professional sporting teams with image management comes from.

Then came newspapers and people could not only keep up with the results of their own team, but other teams as well. This is probably where the preoccupation with statistics and records comes from, as previously it would have been hard for fans to keep track of these as clubs may not have had the resources. Media organisations did however, and realised that fans had an appetite for them.

Radio was the next leap forward in the way sport was disseminated, and once again changed the relationship between sporting organisations and fans. For the first time a dichotomy was created between watching sport at the ground and listening to it at home on the radio. However it was probably not a strong dichotomy because radio was not a visual medium, therefore the experience of consuming sport at home missed out on one of the vital sense.

However the radio era did globalise sport to a certain extent. Although not cosmopolitan, it made Australian audiences more aware of sporting contests that were taking place overseas, particularly in places like Great Britain. Here I’m thinking particularly of the 1934 Ashes series were over by over descriptions were telexed from the UK to a studio in Sydney and recreated as though they were really happening.

Television changed things again, creating a visual aspect to consuming sports at home, but in a sense it was also a step backwards because when television was introduced the technology was not in place for many live broadcasts. However, this is probably the era where sport was truly commoditised when its considered that the Olympic Games launched television in Australia. Ever since there has been a strong relationship between the two.

Truly live television created a true dichotomy between watching sport at the ground and watching it in the home, and solidified sport’s place as a television (and media) commodity. It was in this era that battles were fought over sporting rights, as media moguls wanted the best live sporting content for their networks. This gave sporting organisations previously untold riches and brought a new professionalism to games.

The era of cable and satellite television brought more channels and consequently more sports. For the first time audiences could experience regular sporting contests from overseas on a regular basis, instead of special events being broadcast and weekly highlights packages being offered in the meantime.

This is the era in which sport truly started to become global. Thanks to satellite and cable television it is now possible for global fans to immerse themelves in the experience of watching and following a sporting team without being at the ground to experience it.

Finally the era sport has now entered into is that of social media or Web 2.0. This is beginning to create a bottom up rather than top down approach to sports media, as fans have even more choice about the sorts of sports media they consume, and the ability to customise it. It is also further locking in global sporting teams by giving fans the tools to form networks and communities with like minded sports lover, consequently created a virtual analogue of the community feel that has always been a part of sport.