In the Metro yesterday was a feature with the headline, “Text messages sparked football match violence”. Considering decades of street battles between the two football clubs, in times of pay phones – rather than pay-as-you-go – the news that scuffles were agitated by communication via mobile phones is not surprising. The Metro is not alone in this reporting. The Guardian lead an item with “’Firms’ used web to organize football violence”, a statement unsubstantiated in a post largely devoted to other parts of the story. These features are misleading as to exactly what role digital media had in creating the actions taken by some fans.

In channeling flexible and lightweight technologies to achieve a shared aim, social media is now demonstrated in all human pursuits, from the macro, such as the Iranian elections to the micro such as Jordan’s self publicity.

Why should football violence be any different?

The intersection of technology and communication are creating new behaviors, from informal meeting times betweens friends to large scale platforms for easier sharing: Skype connects people across the globe for free.

With the emergence of targeting, this shift is going to be even more powerful. This is how social media created greater reach to those ready to engage in the pitch invasions during the recent Carling cup-tie. In riots there are three types of people: those that will never riot, those that are always quick and ready to riot, and those that wait to see what the crowd does before acting. In the case of Upton Park the question was posed: to riot or not to riot? By targeting the group who are always prepared to riot those that can be influenced to riot could be agitated into action. The behavioral profile of the crowd determined the outcome, as the majority of people will never riot, the action of the people, although powerful, was within a small section of the crowd.

In leveraging new ways of organizing groups it’s not only about reaching more people – rather the right ones for your message. Seth Godin refers to this as marketing within a tribe, those that have shared interests spreading ideas and values across a group, creating influence. To expect the message to always remain pure or commercial is misguided.

The implication that technology should have a moral code of use, only to be used for elevated endeavors, is not new and is clearly an ideal rather than a reality. Technology is sometimes adapted from its initial intent, for example the NASA-invented blow rubber molding used on Nike running shoes. Platforms will and can be exploited for more anti social practices.

What we are seeing are the lengths to which individuals who were scattered and isolated with fringe goals are able to unite to achieve the spectrum of human ideology and desire. The point of these outliers is not that digital media is being exploited for deviant means. It is the speed and efficiency that  they enable.  By leveraging social networking and SMS as communication stacks it was possible to reach out to an audiance better and agitate a crowd quicker. Marketing has a similair objective – to spread messages through a marketplace, creating consumer action.

Brand communications also need to create emotion in consumers to stir the action expected of them. Those that do – such as Zappos – demonstrate the power of social media: by being transparent, in reaching out to people with a pure proposition comprised of inherent marketplace values (customer service in Zappos’ case), people do unite to promote products and services. T-Mobile realized this to great effect with their Trafalgar Sq. flash mob.

All areas of our social being are being affected through developments in technology and communications. In using online channels effectively, a wide mass of organizations and collectives that participate can be expected to promote their aims better. Once this happens, when you send a message that is resonant with the right audience, a call to action such as the one reported on the Guardian article to bring bats but not your kids, can be spread wider and quicker – and although not everyone listens - more do and then, who knows, if you choose to use digital media for social good, you could start to make a headline for the right reasons.

See his article here.

Since my AR Business Card went viral (over 300,000 views to date) both myself and Skive have had a great deal of attention. Skive are currently working on, pitching and persuing around 7 AR flash projects for some big brands.

Myself, several other Actionscript developers and our 3D artist have been looking into FLARToolkit (the Flash AR code library) and are fully up to speed in this area. We are working on a few more viral videos and concept stuff and have produced a few examples, including our very own logo.

In addition to this we are dedicating time to research a variety of other AR approaches including colour and face detection and languages such as C++ and Objective C (iPhone).

So watch this space over the next couple of months, we should be releasing some fascinating, functional and playful AR applications.

I saw this online ad recently for Wendy’s (yes, rollover to activate it) and I thought how rare it is to see an ‘unclickable’ banner ad.

Should more advertisers at least consider this approach?

It might make sense for those in sectors that generally assess their campaigns using ‘softer’ brand metrics rather than the ‘harder’ DR metrics traditionally associated with digital – FMCG for example, like Wendy’s.

I used to work for an FMCG advertiser where we collectively referred to the online banner advertising we delivered for them as ‘indoor posters’, ie: they performed in a similar way to outdoor advertising and simply drove the awareness of new products and short term offers. We therefore didn’t really care if anyone clicked through to the online destination of the brand, our job had been done simply by getting the ads in front of the right eyeballs.

There are plenty of examples of FMCG brands who’ve proved the ability of digital advertising to deliver on brand metrics and it could be argued that a click-through is not always needed to achieve this. One scientific study (I love science) even dares to propose that audiences are affected by banner advertising even when they don’t click on them. If this is the case then a destination site should not necessarily be a mandatory for a digital advertising campaign. The Wendy’s example does have user interaction in the form of rollover, but I’ve seen unclickable ads in the past that required no interaction.

Adopting an ‘unclickable’ approach may even be a more efficient use of advertising budget as expensive destination sites wouldn’t need to be built for every campaign, particularly in the case of short-term, tactical campaigns.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that all ads should be unclickable (indeed there are certain disadvantages to such an approach e.g. users may always expect an ad to have a destination), I just think that sometimes advertisers and agencies overcomplicate their use of digital when they don’t need to.

Although the unclickable approach certainly doesn’t utilise the potential of digital advertising to its fullest therefore, it can still deliver against certain objectives. Such a campaign may also stand out by not having a click-through, particularly if the creative messaging ties in which I think the Wendy’s example does brilliantly. It’s also worth pointing out that their website is actually pretty good.