Andres Wittermann on international media relations trends

The end of the press

The end of the press is coming nearer. There still are some around who think this is a hype and that in the end this may not happen - we still have many clients who think offline coverage is better than online. When I ask them though where they are getting news from, they say (without a blink of their eyes) "from the internet". Can someone please explain?

Well, here you go - I just found the latest US stats on internet spend online vs offline on Techcrunch, my fav tech blog.

Enjoy the numbers and then let me know where you would spend your marketing budget, after having allocated most of it to PR obviously.

The Poorer, The Yahoo!

An interesting survey by Hitwise shows that socially struggling people tend to use Yahoo! rather than Google. And the more privileged ones are using Google rather than Yahoo! Don't ask me to explain this.

This certainly explains why Ali Baba is now interested in Yahoo! The power to the people, Proletarier aller Länder vereinigt Euch!

The Times Diggs It

My colleague Will Sturgeon just published a post on LEWIS 360 on an interview The Times had with Digg's CEO, Jay Adelson. It seems that traditional journalism does not only wake up to the challenge of blogs but is also increasingly embracing the other aspects of Web 2.0

Read the original interview here.

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.

Germans - the new Chinese?

Today there is a great article on TechCrunch covering the German Web 2.0 scene (by Gregor Hochmuth). You can learn a lot about why Web 2.0 took a bit longer to take off there (technical limitations, language etc.) and what German start-ups in that area look like. The key tune of the article is that there are many companies around who are copying other (US) ideas - and that really original ideas are rare.

As you can see in the comments there already, there are some copycats looking / working better than the "original". I for example like Xing also better than LinkedIn (I'm on both).

The problem remains that Germany just does not have the same entrepreneurial spirit and money as let's say Silicon Valley. That becomes obvious to everyone who ever has spent some time on the West Coast (like I did last November).

There also is a nice overview about Original vs. Copy which I pasted in here from Gregor's article:

Second Life Conquers Germany

I can not resist telling everyone that one of our clients, Second Life, has made it to DER SPIEGEL's cover page. DER SPIEGEL is still the most important weekly news magazine in Germany and I am sure this story will boost German presence on Second Life (currently around 3.8m people present there) enormously.

PR Blogger also reports that Mercedes-Benz has opened a strong presence there. It becomes more and more evident that Second Life is changing the way marketing is being done in the future.

Magazines Moving Online

Visiting our office in Milan, I heard interesting news yesterday.

VNU Italy's CRN magazine (leading channel publication) will publish their LAST HARD-COPY ISSUE on March 1. After that it seems they will publish exclusively online. I actually have heard rumors that a number of magazines are moving online and will shut down their off-line publications.

This is a major challenge for many. For journalists (as many of them will lose their jobs), for readers (as the nature of the news will change and traditional news outlets are already changing their news content) and for advertisers and PR people.

News move online, background and features will be the main content of paper copy. It will be interesting to see how many magazines in other countries will follow this example.