Sunday night Twitter
Love him or hate him, and his x-factor productions, you have to admire Simon Cowell’s commercialism to keep interest in a story running.
The ‘Jedward’ saga generates so much media interest for the X-factor that Simon could not bring himself to judge them out of the competition (no matter how much he claims to hate them) so he, once again, side-stepped the issue and left it to the public.
Putting aside my personal preferences and the fact that this is supposed to be a singing talent competition (Simon C’s definition when it suites him), I decided to get some real-time responses and follow consumer interest through Twitter with #xfactor.
Wow! Talk about a hornet’s nest. At one point, just a few minutes after ‘Simon Cowardly’s’ decision to go public, there were upwards of 1000 new tweets ever 15 seconds. ITV2 were claiming the telephone lines were hot with callers but I can’t imagine that there were a fraction of the nuber of people tweeting their frustration and anger.
Today I’ve received invites to join Facebook groups that ‘Ban X-factor from TV’ and a few others that want to do some horrid things to Mr Cowell. My RSS feeds are hot with news stories and, since I started typing this entry, there’s been another 1748 tweets on #xfactor (so far).
I don’t know if Mr Cowell is on FB, Myspace or tweets or does anything else with Social Media. If he does, well done Simon, your finger is well and truly on the pulse. If he doesn’t, I doubt he’ll much care for what’s said about him and his X-factor. However, there are tens of thousands of conversation going on every second on the social network and to completely ignore them all would be utter maddness; for Mr Cowell, the X-factor, and anyone else who’s not listening to the chatter regarding their brands.
Kindle Frustration
As an early adopter, I was delighted when I heard that Kindle has a launch date for the UK – October 17, 2009.
As a husband of a top author (check out www.theharcombediet.com), I was equally excited about the prospect of being able to help her find an additional route-to-market for her writing skills.
So with massive enthusiasm I jumped in to order my Kindle and get to work on Zoe’s Kindle books.
Now the reality:
Kindle will be available worldwide as of 17.10.09 but it can only be purchased from Amazon.com (in the USA). The price tag of $279 makes it ok value but when you get to the cart, you get charged $20.98 shipping and $45 import tax. Total price $344.98. mmm strange that wasn’t mentioned in any press release.
Ok, so hardware sorted, how about the publishing side? An early claim from Kindle was that it will change the world of publishing, making it easier for authors to get their works published without needing to find a publisher (echos of itunes here…). So after reading all the technical requirements for publishing, which seemed relatively simple if you can manage some basic html, I set off to publish.
Unfortunately, what Amazon don’t tell you is that to have an author account to publish to Kindle you must have a US dollar bank account, a US social security number and a US postal address. Basically, you need to be an American living in America.
So, Kindle is available to the world, you can download any of their 250,000 titles in under 60 seconds each, anywhere on mother earth. Great, as long as you want to read American literature.
Jeff Bezos (Founder of Amazon) states their vision for Kindle is “…to have every book ever printed, in any language, all available in under 60 seconds”
Jeff, if you’re reading this; please, please, please sort out the Author accounts so that authors worldwide can start to add their works. You’ve managed it for Createspace (Amazon’s self-publish service) when will the same be available for Kindle?
Lights out for the 100W bulb
Invented by Thomas Alva Edison and patented in 1879, the electric light bulb has become one of the everyday convenience that affects our daily lives.
Today, the European Union is banning it’s import and manufacture as part of its strategy to reduce energy consumption and, hence, carbon emissions.
In its place comes the high-efficiency bulbs as a direct plug in option. They no doubt are far more efficient than Edison’s incandescent bulbs but they bring their own problems. The use of mercury in their linings makes their disposal an issue and they still have technical shortcomings in terms of light output levels, warm-up times and, some claim, high frequency flicker issues that can trigger epileptic fits and migranes.
Sure, we need to reduce energy consumption but we also need robust strategies for replacement technologies and power generation (UK government in particular).
Pay-per-article: A brave step by Financial Times
With sales of traditional newspapers in continued decline, media houses have been faced with the challenge of how to adapt their revenue model to the digital era, where content is expected to be free.
Financial Times recently revealed that it’s looking at a pay-per-article model which is an extension of its current subscription service. They, quite rightly, state that quality journalism costs money and has a value to the reader. The evolution of this thinking is that readers will, therefore, pay for it. Quite a reasonable view to take in isolation however, with the vast majority of Internet users expecting content to be freely available, how will Mr Murdoch and News Corporation monetise this?
They are certainly looking at the current monthly visitor stats as an opportunity to sell but are they recognising that their current figures are so high because their content is free? Mr Murdoch has a habit of getting these things right; sometimes through clever intuition and marketing, other times oughtright bullying consumers.
Most Internet trends reach the UK from the USA. The demise of traditional newspaper revenue models resulting from free Internet content is already taking place in the USA. I’ll be interested to see how NewsCorp’s brave new step will be accepted on this side of the pond.
Internet sales continue to grow
A recent report by IMRG Capgemini e-Retail Sales Index showed that online sales in the UK for the first six months of 2009 stood at £22.9 billion with June09 showing a 12% increase over May09.
Whereas high street retail sales have only had a positive growth in one month in 2009, online sales have shown an average 14% year on year growth.
Key sectors showing the most growth were clothing accessories and footwear with 63% and 25% year on year growth respectively and the health and beauty sector also experienced a 31% change over the same period.
Although overall sales have increased, individual website conversion rates continues to drop. This sugegsts that online shoppers are being far more selective in their purchasing and browsing more for the best prices. website conversion rates have declined from 7-8% in 2007, to 5-6% in 2008 and to the current 4-5% in 2009.
Gallery
Share your thoughts..