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Mumsnet Academy set for success

The latest offering from the parenting website Mumsnet combines the user experience and business savvy for which the site is renowned, says Alex Humpage

Popular parenting website Mumnset has taken a significant step into expanding its brand by creating a series of workshops, courses and other events across the UK.

Mumsnet, which has been running for 12 years, is an old hand in comparison to the most talked-about brands in the online world. It has traded off and built upon this success, publishing four books and leading high-profile media campaigns against lads mags and for better post-miscarriage care. Perhaps most famously, Mumsnet was given frequent, and arguably exaggerated, coverage during the UK general elections in 2010, when party leaders engaged directly with the site’s audience through widely-publicised web chats.

With the new experiential venture Mumsnet Academy, site owners will be hoping for more direct engagement between the audience and the events it is facilitating.

Several partners are already on board including the Faber Academy, which offers courses in creative writing, and Great British Chefs, offering cooking courses. The courses, which are evenly spread across the country, have been well matched to the upmarket and generally affluent Mumsnet audience, be it garden designing, small business management or writing classes. This effective matching will help Mumsnet deliver revenues from this activity.

The site already has a solid business proposition, with big advertisers such as Marks & Spencer and Unilever spending hundreds of thousands of pounds to reach the site’s 2m monthly users. Users are an active bunch; consuming nearly 40m pages of content each month and contributing more than 25,000 content posts. This level of engagement suggests that offline learning events are likely to resonate well with at least a portion of the site’s users.

This is a calculated move by Mumsnet. Having selected event partners, it passes on much of the risk, in return for granting access to the Mumsnet audience. It is easy to imagine that should these initial events prove successful, more commercially focused brands could seek to engage with these parents. Think a children's nutrition course brought to you by Cow & Gate, or a massage masterclass sponsored by Johnson's Baby Oil.

The likelihood of success is further enforced by the combination of soft roll out and the social media nous for which Mumsnet is famous. This cautious, considered approach may yet be a blueprint for other web companies who are looking to expand into new territories.

The creation of these offshoots from companies that were born digitally is nothing new; with other web 2.0 darlings such as Spotify and Last.fm arranging music gigs in their own right, it represents a trend for consolidation of a strong digital base with low-risk expansions. In a world where users are increasingly hard to reach with traditional advertising this offers brands a way to communicate with potential consumers in a more informal, but deeply engaged, way.

Carat report: Sony Radio Academy Awards

The radio industry was out in force last night for the Sony Radio Academy Awards – the highlight of the radio year. Carat’s head of radio Mike Williamson was there for all the action.

Hosted by Chris Evans in front of stars from both BBC and commercial radio, with performances from Jessie J and Gary Barlow, last night night showed the strength and impact of radio to both listeners and advertisers.

Commercial radio scooped 13 gold awards, one less than its highest ever haul last year. Every major commercial group went home with a gold.

Bauer won the most gold awards: Station Programmer of the Year for Kiss FM’s Andy Roberts; Breakfast Show of the Year (audience of 10m plus) for Kiss FM; and station of the Year for Liverpool’s Radio City 96.7.

Global Radio’s Classic FM won the Special Award, in recognition of its ‘significant and valuable contribution’ to commercial radio in this its 20^th anniversary year. Best Use of Branded Content went to XFM’s Danny Wallace Breakfast Show.

Richard Keys and Andy Gray won Best Sports Programme, beating off strong competition from the BBC. Richard Keys was visibly moved in his acceptance speech, thanking talkSPORT for hiring himself and Gray after their controverisal exit from Sky Sports, and paid tribute to the station’s loyal listeners.

Absolute Radio won Best Single Promo/Commercial for Geoff Lloyd’s Hometime Show. GMG won Breakfast Show of the Year (under 10 million) for Real Radio North East, and also Best Feature/Special/Documentary for Walking With The Wounded with media icon Simon ‘Dags’ Daglish there to accept the award.

The BBC won 22 awards in total. Most notably Auntie scooped: Speech Radio Personality of the Year – Danny Baker, Radio 5 Live; Music Broadcaster of the Year - Jools Holland, BBC Radio 2; Music Radio Personality of the Year – Chris Evans, BBC Radio 2; Best Music Programme – Fearne Cotton, BBC Radio 1; and UK Station of the Year – BBC 6 Music

The quality of the winners shows the enduring power of radio. Chris Evans, Jools Holland, Richard Keys and Andy Gray, Danny Wallace and Fearne Cotton are all household names and continue to attract huge listener figures to their radio shows.

However the biggest reception went to BBC Radio Humberside’s Betty and Beryl for winning Best Entertainment Programme. Beryl, 86, and Betty, 90, beat off competition from Absolute Radio’s Frank Skinner and BBC 6 Music’s and Adam and Joe to win the award and received a standing ovation from the 1,300 strong audience

Bing cannot win without improved algorithm

Microsoft’s search engine is rightly focusing on interactivity with social networks, but until user experience improves it cannot hope to dent Google’s supremacy, says Leaon White.

MSN has made some big changes to its search engine recently. We’ve seen Yahoo and Bing join forces in the UK to form the Search Alliance, in the hope the joint audience will help both companies compete with Google’s seemingly unshakeable dominance.

Next Bing devolved its search listings, making it simpler for users to see and find what they wanted. A forthcoming evolution of the search results page in the US will follow a three tiered approach: regular search results; universal search results including maps and photos; and a social sidebar bringing together the major networks Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

This development means Bing users can have enhanced results, based upon what friends like. A search for restaurants, for example, could bring up places that friends have liked or recommended. As commentators have noted, this move has to be seen as a direct swipe at Google.

This recent development is a natural step forward. Social platforms are gaining increasing leverage within people’s online habits and the importance of friends’ opinions are being utilised more and more within marketing.

But for me the most important question for Bing remains: When will it improve the quality of its search results?

Most of us have at some point Googled ourselves - but the same kind of search on Bing throws up many unwanted or unrelated results.

If Bing wants to take on Google it is moving in the right direction with its new interactivity with key social networks. This is particularly pertinent considering the genuine impact of Google+ on the social scene is still up for debate. This is only really underpinned by the volume of users on Google and their almost subversive acceptance of new ‘life improving’ offerings.

But without an improved algorithm Bing will continue to lag behind Google.

The recent changes are certainly dynamic and could help in bringing more users to Bing, but until the quality of its search offering improves it may struggle to make a real impression.

Some further reading

http://searchengineland.com/the-new-bing-microsoft-tries-again-with-search-meets-social-120728

http://www.brandrepublic.com/bulletin/digitalambulletin/article/1131452/bing-steps-challenge-google-new-social-search-feature/?DCMP=EMC-CONDigitalAM

So Monday 14.05.12

Bringing you the best in social and mobile every week

Facebook announce app centre

‘Today, we’re announcing the App Center, a new place for people to find social apps.’ The launch of their App Center is a great move for the business and even better for brands, ensuring developers are building useful and fun cross platform apps. We don’t know the revenue share applied to the new platform, Apples is a 60/40 split – likely to be less than this. In the coming weeks, people will be able to access the App Center on the web and in the iOS and Android Facebook apps. All canvas, mobile and web apps that follow the guidelines can be listed. It's an important and necessary step for Facebook who need to keep Apple and Google within grasp especially in the mobile industry, it also backs up their key theme, build in HTML 5! Have a look here.

Student idea: Ray Ban bright light

A group of students from Berghs School of Communication in Stockholm created this fun concept app with Ray Ban in mind. The Bright Light app finds sunny spots in your city to enjoy the sun quietly away from loud buildings. The aim behind the app is to help people get the most out of the sun and their sunglasses, and we know how precious those sunny days are... Have a look at the app in action here.

Disney Touché turns everyday objects into multi-touch interfaces

Touché is the latest development from Disney Research, a system that can turn almost any object into a multi-touch, gesture-recognising display. Touché could be used to enhance touchscreen devices like smartphones but it could also turn everyday objects such as doorknobs, tables, liquids into touch interfaces that react to different actions like a computer mouse being used by two different people. Have a look at this video to see the huge potential this development could have. Mind blowing we think.

in-store Fashion Likes

If you're from the indecisive kind when shopping for clothes, the Brazilian subsidiary of clothing store C&A are bringing each item's popularity to the in-store experience to help you choose. The Fashion Like campaign consists of specially programmed electronic hangers with real-time 'like' counters on the selected clothing items, based on an initial research process among their Facebook fans and continually updated. If you need a second opinion this might be the answer, check out the case study here.

Toys and mobile working hand in hand

A few examples that shows that a mobile phone can be more than just the device its self. We’re all in love with touching our smartphones and we will continue to, but in Japan you can purchase a baseball game that you slot your phone into, lets you step back in time and gives the digital device a nostalgic analogue feel. Other brands like Disney have developed iPad apps that you can download for free, you just need to buy a ‘Disney’s Cars’ toy and launch into a whole new app and gaming experience. The toy car has four touch points where the wheels are and it interacts with the iPad app – so rather than your child driving the car over the antique dining table, they can play with it on the iPad in lots of gaming environments and it talks to you! Here is a demo of the product.

Evidence based: Social is the new word of mouth

Using statistics sourced from around the globe, Dan Calladine lets the numbers do the talking as he analyses media trends. This week he looks at social media.

Social coverage has focused most sharply on acquisitions in recent weeks – Facebook’s purchase of Instagram and LinkedIn’s acquisition of SlideShare to name but two examples. But the $1bn price tag Facebook gave Instagram was just one of the many records have steadily been smashed in the social world.

As of March 31, Facebook reported 901m monthly active users, an increase of one third on its reported 680m monthly active users in March 2011.

Zuckerberg’s behemoth also reported 526m daily active users – an increase of a whopping 41 per cent on the 372m it reported in March 2011. And there were 488m monthly active users of Facebook’s mobile products in March 2012. This last figure is perhaps the most important for two reasons: firstly mobile is generally considered to be one of Facebook’s most important growth areas, as demonstrated by the recent acquisition of Instagram; and secondly, Facebook’s mobile offering has been criticised for its perceived poor quality, but this does not seem to be holding users back.

Our second record-breaker, over on Twitter, was the 13,684 tweets per second recorded following Fernando Torres’ late goal in the Champions League semi-final between Chelsea and Barcelona. This broke the previous record for tweets per second, the 12,233 generated during the Super Bowl in February.

All this activity adds up to the social world really coming of age. Expect records to continue to be shattered. And expect, as discussed here, client budgets to shift into social media with a new and earnest focus.

According to Nielsen’s latest global trust in advertising survey, 92 per cent of consumers trust earned media – including social - above all other forms of advertising. Meanwhile, trust in paid TV and print adverts declined by up to one quarter since 2009. Regardless, the majority of advertising spend is still directed at these traditional forms of media. But with social effectively becoming the new word-of-mouth – and crucially, word-of-mouth that brands can track and monitor, the numbers are sure to start telling a different story.