Andres Wittermann on international media relations trends

Watch Your Mouth - WOM, the new marketing approach

Yesterday I attended a breakfast event where Germany's first word of mouth marketing agency, trnd, presented this new marketing tool. Some may already be aware of this new approach, there already have been many campaigns in the US, in Germany, even in Poland already.

The idea is to involve a selected group of opinion leaders in your marketing campaign directly. They receive products to check them out - and to talk about them to their friends. These may even also receive some product samples - because the idea is they again talk to their friends and these to their friends - an so on. There are blogs being created as part of the campaigns (like this one about an Opel campaign) and generally the WOM'ers are creating lots of stuff around the products they review and talk about (like videos, pictures etc who then will be sent to the usual platforms like Flickr, Youtube, Sevenload etc).

WOM (Word of Mouth) marketing is taking PR directly to the opinion leaders and let them do the marketing for you (you don't even have to pay them directly - although I have been told in the end WOM campaigns are far from inexpensive).

Interestingly with many products traditional WOM really had a strong impact on buying decisions - because people trust their friends more than ads or even journalists (!). My fear is that once people realize that WOM is now being part of a professional marketing campaign and the WOM'ers are directly supported by the vendors, the value of WOM is decreasing fast. Like no-one today trusts ads anymore and people even start disbelieving TV. Still, it will be interesting to see how WOM is going to develop and how we will come across some of the campaigns in the future.

Vitter yourself - Seesmic merges Twitter and video

Yesterday TechCrunch wrote about Loic LeMeur's new company, Seesmic. Here is a good short summary about what this is.

I have not tried it yet, but it sounds interesting. Twitter itself is not that widely spread in Europe yet, but Seesmic may man a jump ahead - and some people may just go for this straight away. It allows interaction between users through their self-generated and professional content. You can upoad your videos from Seesmic to plaforms like Twitter or Youtube, but you can also copy videos (their URL's) from Youtube onto Seesmic and thus generate your own video story.

Loic's vision is to build a new Online TV platform. Seeing how some video portals already can be subscribed to by Tivo and others, Seesmic may jst well be another step towards how IPTV may look like soon - and what challenges traditional TV is going to face.

I would be interested to hear about people's experience with Seesmic and also feedback from some European Twitters - I have the feeling that people only slowly are realizing the value of it.

The Country of Two Speeds - Lithuania

I have just attended a conference on e-marketing in Vilnius, Lithuania. I had never been in any of the Baltic countries,, so it was quite an experience. The city is vast, although there are 'only' half a million people living there. The city is a mix of some socialist-era left-overs and quite Scandinavian-looking buildings and streets. In 2009 this will be Europe's cultural capital and I can only recommend to go there and check yourself what a beautiful city this is.

The conference itself was another experience. There were discussions on if it really makes sense to sell things online, I also learned that in Lithuania there are hardly any online auctions - and in Poland eBay is miles behind a local competitor. On the other side 75% of all Lithuanians are doing their tax declaration online - a figure which puts most of Western European countries to shame (or all?).

The interest is definitely there, some entrepreneurs are quickly developing interesting campaigns and technologies - but it seems to me that there is still a bit to go to convince the whole country of what Web 2.0 really means.

The press was also there, but there is not a very large press landscape in Lithuania. The country still falls into three languages (Lithuanian, Russian and also a bit of Polish), so there still are some language and culture barriers to overcome.

I am already looking forward to the next event and wonder how many  journalists we will see next time.

SAP Changes Growth Strategy

So far Germany's biggest software company (not that there would be many around), SAP, had stayed clear off acquisitions - their main competitor's (Oracle) key strategy to grow fast.

Today SAP announced the acquisition of one of the few left business intelligence (BI) software companies, Business Objects. At a price tag of EURO 4.8b ($6.77b) this does not only mean SAP's biggest acquisition ever - it also means a general shift in growth strategy as the company so far tried to grow organically.

This to me seems to indicate two things:
1) The stock markets are hotter than ever (Germany's tech index, Tecdax, just jumped over 1,000 mark for the first time) and it seems this still will continue for a while
2) The IT and especially the software industry undergoes the fastest change in its history with more companies than ever merging or being acquired by others.

This fast consolidation will certainly mean a big change in culture across the industry. Let's hope customers will benefit from it (and not only shareholders) and that creativity will continue to drive the developments. Most developments which recently changed the world (like the internet) were developed by initially small companies and it would be a shame to see the industry grow big, old, mature and satisfied.