S60 Open to new features

"Raj, Bohemian" by Hari Kunzru is a short story about a young hipster who gets weirded out after he discovers that people whom he considered to be friends are actually hawking product. Do real friends not recommend products to other friends? Is working for a company and "pushing" product on friends wrong? Is the character right to become upset? I think I know what Kunzru's take on this is, and I'm guessing he might not appreciate the notion of S60 Ambassadors. I saw plenty of parallels in the story to various forms of "shill" or even "Word of Mouth" marketing.

I'm curious to know what some of the S60 Ambassadors who took part in our pilot programs think. Maybe I'm just rationalizing, but the big difference between the characters in this story and S60 Ambassadors are twofold:

1) S60 Ambassadors promise to be upfront about the fact that they are in the S60 Ambassador program, and
2) We don't actively recruit hipsters (tho I'm sure some of you are) to be S60 Ambassadors, anyone who reads the blogs and forums can join. Our preference, rather than hipsters, is for techies. But again, the application process is open and transparent.

Check out the story here if you're curious to see the author's take on what "Permission Marketing" may or may not have become.

A quick follow up to my Help Wanted entry a few weeks ago: I got many applicants to the position. I was very excited to see readers of S60 blogs eager to join our team and eager to help engage our readers further. Many of you submitted excellent resumes.

In the end, I split the position into two part time positions, one for Ricky Cadden and one for Stefan Constantinescu. Most of you know Ricky from Symbian Guru, and most of you know Stefan from RingNokia and IntoMobile. (In fact, it seems from my email that most of you already know that both have been hired. I try to get onto this blogging thing but blogging already seems old-fashioned, news traveled via jaiku and various other forums eons ago.)

I hope that all who applied will continue to stay engaged-- who knows what the future will bring. Ricky and Stefan had a leg up, in a way: I had previously had the good fortune of meeting Ricky at the "Evening with S60" in Chicago and Stefan at the "Evening with S60" in New York. Going forward, bureaucratic gods willing (sometimes getting even small things done in a big company can take weeks or months), Ricky and Stefan will be working directly with S60 Ambassadors through the "Share on Ovi" campaign. They've already been a tremendous help behind the scenes, bringing their sense of what consumers like/want as well as broader strategic sense of what the competitive situation is for S60.

Here's Stefan, after hearing he made the team: (Thanks to Carol from the S60 Multimedia blog for capturing the moment).

Here's Ricky, on any given Friday:

The S60 Ambassador program is open for applicants again. No geographical limitations this time around. If you own an S60-based phone, you are in. Sign up here!

This is the 3rd and hopefully final pilot before we get the new S60 Ambassador website launched.

Some great data in the March 17th issue of BusinessWeek on ad spending trends relative to GDP in the USA since 1945. Spending of course peaked in the dot.com boom, and has been falling fairly steadily since. Spending on internet adversing was up 25.6% in 07 over 06.

And revenues at the Big 6 ad agencies were up in 07 vs. 06, but market caps were down, as shown here:

S&P 500: -3%
Omnicom Group -12
WPP Group -17
Havas -18
Publicis Group -18
Interpublic Group -32

So I'm playing a board game with my son Henry this morning while we listen to the radio. For some reason the college stations weren't coming in so I settled for commercial radio. After 15 minutes of radio bliss, the inevitable run of commercials starts. I manage to sit through the first 4 commercials. By the fifth, my skin starts to crawl. I have to change the channel or turn it off. I can't find the remote. I get up to turn it off. Henry looks up and demands "Where are you going daddy? It's your turn!" "Sorry, I have to turn off the radio". "But daddy, don't turn if off. If you turn it off you won't know what stuff to buy!"

No joke. My own son, smitten by broadcast advertising. Maybe the 6 year old set is the last demographic susceptible to broadcast ads. In another 2 months, when he turns 7, he'll be just as good at tuning it out and turning it off as the rest of us. Or so I hope.

Great piece on forecasting consumer trends on the front page of the New York Times Business Day Saturday.

Lots of details on the science and art of phone HW design at Nokia. My favorite quote from the article, though, is from Mr. Jeremy Dale of Motorola. The article points out that sometimes interesting designs do not spell success, and then quotes Mr. Dale as saying: "The strongest marketing tool is the first 20,000 peole who buy the device. If they like it, they will tell their friends."

We'll try to both encourage people who like S60-based products to tell their friends, and find out what people are talking about, through our Ambassador programs.