Earlier this morning I was privileged to be on Radio Wammo live talking about this years #wordcampnz in Auckland next Saturday 21st of April. We talked about who should come along, why and what it is all about.

The format is q & a with no real script. Glenn Williams does this every day and once the talk is over the video goes up on the Radio Wammo site within minutes.

RadioWammo runs on WordPress (as do many media sites now.)  It is radio with the added zest of being able to watch it either live on ustream or later off the site. Below is my post on the wordcampnz site

“Glenn Williams is a tech media whiz. His @radiowammo show is a treasure trove of radio shows with great people such as Vaughn Davis, Jayson Bryant, Ben Young, Russell Brown and even a very long running series with Sam Hunt.

What is different about Radio Wammo is that Glenn live mixes the video on air. The various shows are on each weekday between 7am & 10am (UTC 1900-2200) and on demand 24/7 at other times.

The show is mostly completely unscripted and completely live with no edits – enjoy. Questions and comments as always are very welcome.”

“P.S – For wordcampers – Glenn will be doing a lightning talk on Saturday afternoon about Radio Wammo see our latest speaker announcement.

I forgot to mention we will filming all speakers on Saturday and making a mixtape DVD of the results for #wordcampnz attendees. BTW – we won’t be live streaming since there are some bandwidth challenges with our particular location although we may try to do some of that if we can.

Sites mentioned in the show:

• TangataWhenua.com    speakers Nik & Potaua see speakers
• Paleo Zone Nutrition speaker Julianne Taylor
• Crown Fibre Holdings speaker (the writer – Jason Kemp)
• NZ Womans Weekly“

Special feature (WordPress example in the show) have a look at the Crown Fibre site. CFH is all about the Ultra Fast Broadband rollout in NZand is a project that I have been working on for quite some time. It has been completely rebuilt in WordPress and I’m delighted to have been the developer on the project.

Will do a separate post about that – please let me know what you think about the video and do come along to #wordcampnz next weekend.

So what do bananas have to do with branding? We now live in a world where the back story to our brands is as important as the one constructed by the PR people and the marketing team.

Branding is a 2 way process and anyone in the branding foodchain can tell their story quite easily. There is also a huge amount of business in selling bananas. According to this list of banana facts

“Banana is the most popular fruit in the world – people spend over $25 billion a year on the fruit globally.”

Now that online media is ubiquitous we can be sure that questions will be asked and / or that other stories about our brands will become known especially online. I like this project because it is an example of two growing trends in the branding universe.

1.  The old tactics of legal strong-arming (overly agressive PR) and related activities will become part of the story. Online everyone has some influence. Bananas have a long history in fair trade circles and while new routes to market have been successful most of the banana crop still comes via large companies so there is a lot at stake.
2.  Kickstarter allows project founders a clever way to publicise and productise their projects. Kickstarter as a brand has created a groundswell of community funding behind causes because the platform makes it easy to get involved. Being online makes it much easier for a few hundred people pledging anything from $5 to way more to participate and make projects happen. From a branding perspective this also helps to validate the project and ideas behind it.*

The video clip below comes from the Kickstarter project to complete a documentary on bananas.  As the film maker Fredrik Gertten notes

“It all started with my previous film BANANAS!* which recounts the lawsuit that 12 Nicaraguan plantation workers brought against the Dole Food Company, the largest fruit corporation in the world.

When the film was about to premiere at the Los Angeles Film Festival, Dole tried to stop it at all cost, claiming the documentary was “fraudulent” – although they hadn’t even seen it. Dole’s law firm sent us a “cease and desist” letter demanding of us to withdraw the film and close its website, or we would get sued. “

A 4m video clip about the project is below. The project will only be funded if at least $15,000 is pledged by Mon Mar 12, 3:50AM NZDT and as of today 13% away. I’ve backed this project as I have watched earlier work by Gertten and so I’m hoping that the doco reaches its target.

Kickstarter is a peer funding project that seems particularly suited for film projects and many documentaries have now been funded in the past 2 years.

* Imagine you have a new widget for the toy market like this Elevation Dock: The Best Dock For iPhone which closed on Feb 12th with $1,4m in funding from 12,521 BACKERS $1,464,706 pledged of a $75,000 GOAL so massively oversubscribed and the product developers have a backlog of actual prepaid orders in this example.

The economics of making more than 10,000 of the docks will certainly help that business scale up and build a great brand.

Update: Feb 25th. Looks like the doco above will get funded and here is another Kickstarter project with a NZ angle that you might like. Just funded with a goal of $90k.
BOY: the American release!A Narrative Film project in Los Angeles, CA by Taika Waititi

Here is a glimpse into the future of online shopping from Korea. What is exciting and significant here is that customers using mobile phones are able to use QR codes to short cut straight to a shopping cart by scanning those codes directly off a poster.

We have seen some use of QR codes and mostly it has been trivial to date.

“A QR code (abbreviated from Quick Response code) is a type of matrix barcode (or two-dimensional code) designed to be read by smartphones. The code consists of black modules arranged in a square pattern on a white background. The information encoded may be text, a URL, or other data.”

For QR codes to be useful shoppers need to have access to a QR reader cable ecommerce shopping system, a smart phone and fast, inexpensive mobile data.

The display posters are close to lifesize photos of each of the products. I can see this is an exceptional idea for extending online shopping functionality to busy locations where a billboard space might be available.

In effect shoppers are able to browse the equivalent of a several metres wide screen image of key products without going near a computer. Although to be fair their smart phones do need to be able to read the qr codes off the posters.

We need to do some more research on exactly how to do this for online shopping sites but I suspect billboard owners will be extremely excited about this

My QR code is displayed at left and if you have a reader you can scan my contact details but just imagine I could also sell you an ecommerce report at the same time.

Now we’re talking business !

P.S We’ve been watching all of the coupon sites and while that seems like a good way to drive offline media traffic on to online channels not all deals work that well for vendors or the media channels.

Also the price of accessing the old media (TV for the most part) is still expensive and the unintended consequences of a huge rush of traffic to a website or physical store is not easy to manage or profit from. Getting repeat business is not easy to do if most of the shoppers are deal takers who just chase discounts.

“We’ve also heard consistently from certain categories of businesses (very popular ones I’m afraid) that daily deals are uneconomic for them, which does raise questions around the sustainability of “50% off” daily deals for these types of businesses.”

Yelp CEO says they are working on new developments to the daily deal type of business.

My money is on QR codes and this store concept from Korea is the future of online stores and no unsustainable 50% off foolish deals are needed to get more online business by heading down the QR path.