Social Media Strategy & Engagement Marketing by Karl Long

Why not make commercials that people want to watch, ads that people seek out, send to friends, discuss. A nice article on the New York Times talks about this in a piece called Commercials Find New Life on Web:

In the end advertising is content, if it’s good people watch it, and if it sucks people ignore it…. unless it sucks so much people send it on to friends
On a related note, this is what bud.tv is trying to capitalize on, that advertising is content, and in many ways companies can become sponsors in the real sense of the word, patrons of the advertising arts. Brand Autopsy has written recently on this, and thinks they are setting themselves up for failure:

This is a quote from an interview with Tony Ponturo, VP of Global Media & Sports Marketing in a wall street journal article.

He has lost his mind if he thinks bud.tv is going to get close to youtube in 90 days.

Anyway, i’m just off to get on a plane, liquid and gel free i might add, to Boston for the weekend. I tell you, when you feel like Palm Beach Airport is the central front in terror the terrorists have truly won.

A few days ago I wrote about Lonelygirl15 and how it had been discovered that she was not an angst ridden teenager, but a figment of some filmmakers imagination. Just today the New York Times published a great article about it that includes Lonelygirls real name (Jessica Rose), and where she’s from (New Zealand) etc.

In my article on September 8th though, I did something pretty typical, I misspelt something, namely Lonely, I actually spelt it Lonley, which still looks right to me Unfortunately because Lonleygirl15 slips past the spellcheck, and i’m dyslexic it went live. As it turns out a lot of other people can’t spell lonely either, take a look at this:

Yep, over a 1,000 people hit my site because they misspelled lonelygirl15, and that’s just since since September 8th. Not only does it indicate a lot of people are misspelling it, it also indicates how huge a story this is and how many people are interested in it.

In many ways I am an unlikely blogger because I suffered so badly at school due to my poor written work. Oral exams were almost always an A, and written projects always a C, so when I left school I vowed never to write again. Here I am now 3+ years into blogging, and I accept that mistakes will happen, but they don’t define my work, my world, or my perception of my self. Although I still have some very good friends that read my blog and just beg me to get an editor. I wonder, does the value of getting my thinking and ideas out there in the world outweigh the possibility that my credibility will be hurt when people discover that I am a total grammar and spelling dunce.

It’s awful to admit but on the occasion that i’ve been a participant in online dating, i’ve skipped over profiles that made heinous spelling errors. Am I a spellist of the worst kind…

So what does the Blair Witch Project, Lost, and Lonelygirl15 have in common? Well on the surface they had what we might call “viral” components, lots of buzz, lots of WOM (Word Of Mouth); all things that marketers are frantically “adding to the plan”. But each of these phenomena were driven by narrative, mystery, and discovery; they were/are puzzles that engage the audience (and I use audience in the loosest possible way), they make the audience participants. Part story, part treasure hunt, there is nothing passive about it for those that opt to engage, but of course there is an audience as well, one that sits back on the couch and watches it unfold, and their experience is surely richer for all the fanatics involved as well. Surely it is no coincidence that the word “fan” is derived from fanatic.

Well, the recent unprecidented interest in Lonelygirl15 (which I might add since I misspelled it lonleygirl15 has generated twice the normal traffic here), has introduced me to a concept called Alternate Reality Gaming, which is very much beyond viral. As i’m only just introduced to the subject, I thought I’d share a few sites about it:

First off, the grandaddy site the ARGN (alternate reality gameing network), a collection of sites dedicated to the topic.

The network sites include:

Somewhat tangentially related is a 24 - 48 hour treasurehunt in the bay area called simply “the game”

I’m fascinated in these rich games that are essentially enabled through technology, and social media, absolutely fascinating. In many ways it is an example of what Chris Anderson talks about in the Long Tail, we’re not as mainstream as we think.

And lost fans, check out the Generally Speaking Lost Podcast, each show dissected weekly.

mortgage trigger leads

Hug Zeldman linked to some things that he wrote on 9/11

Hug Zefrank talks about what he was doing on 9/11

Link for Feedfans

Funny video, but they also used this term which I haven’t heard before “Alternate Reality Gaming.”

More about Lonelygirl15 here

Link to vid for feedfans

The future of trade shows, in-store promotions, and uniforms is looking very scary. If you think banners are annoying WTF do you do if the persons t-shirt has video running on it. Even worse if the person happens to have boobs, no really I was looking at the video promotion.

BTW what a great way youtube is for Philips to share an innovation like this. I had actually read about this earlier in the day, and thought “so what”. Then I saw the video and could really see what the big deal was. Have half a million people opted in to watch any of your product announcements?

Courtesy of my sister blog tcritic.com the daily t-shirt blog

Link to the movie for Feedreader fans

Spinal Tap is one of my favorite movies, and I love the mockumentory format, and Teenie Weenie is pretty damn good considering. So far it’s been viewed almost half a million times over the last 4 days, rated 2500 times, commented 1100 times. Pretty engaged audience right there.

Tip of the Hat Jake at the communityguy.com blog

In a news item from Ad-land’s commercial archive they note a joint venture between London based viral video pioneers DMC and viral tracking service BoldMouth. This will be an interesting mix of both the creative and the metrics.

Kind of a sign that viral is becoming, dare I say it, more of an accepted business practice, or marketing strategy.

It seems that the Europeans seem to be a bit ahead of the game on the formalization of viral marketing, which I find rather unusual, as Americans are the consummate marketers. Here’s another full service viral firm that includes creative, seeding, and metrics: GoViral

“viral marketing - budgeting beyond social media”
The questions they aim to answer are:

• What tactics will viral marketers use in the coming year?
• How will consumers react to new viral marketing tactics?
• What steps can viral marketers take to capitalize on consumers seeking more information?

I’d love to find out a bit more about this paper, if anyone gets some an inside track on it let me know. I’ve been hard on Jup, but they have some smart folks, and I would actually like to see them create a successful practice here.

For anyone that missed it, a recent youtube starlett, Lonleygirl15, who was the epitome of a teenage angst ridden vlogger on youtube has been found out as a fake. She captured the hearts of many, and each of her videos were watched half a million times or so, she is also the second most subscribed to channel of all time on youtube. More interesting though was the “lost like” obsession of her fans that turned this into an investigation trying to find out who she was. Anyway LA Times reports Lonleygirl15 was a hollywood creation (or at least some film makers), and a viral sensation. Bob Garfield is happy, as he had proposed this, and it was a big topic of discussion on sundays edition of On The Media (which i highly recommend as a podcast). Lonleygirl15 though seems to have been more of an art experiment than any kind of nefarious marketing fakery. Think of it like a new kind of fiction, or art form.

Update: Great article in the New Yorker about Lonleygirl15

Also, Lonleygirl15 top search on technorati this morning

Here’s the message that was on the Lonelygirl15 formums “message from the creators”

UPDATE: The New York Times writes today

Very interesting she is of New Zealand origin, I was recently thinking a couple of her pronunciations sounded Australian (forgive me kiwi’s that was my first thought, and it was a barely perceptible accent).