The Experience Is The Marketing
Someone sent me an Excel spreadsheet today to my gmail account and google was kind enough to offer to open it in “google spreadsheet” which it did, flawlessly.
Looks like Google needs some kind of Clippy type character that says things like “it looks like your trying to open a microsoft office document… screw those guys open it in your browser”.
The decision Nintendo made to innovate around the control of video games and bow out of the 3d arms race continues to pay dividend, generating interest, and encouraging creativity.
Jeff Jarvis of Buzzmachine, Pete Cashmore at mashable, and the bbc are all reporting that Chad Hurley (one of YouTube’s founders) has hinted that YouTube will be rolling out a way for its users to share in ad revenue generated by their videos. (it’s worth noting that paidcontent.org is referring to this as “vaporshare”) Clearly this is going to be a bit of a concern for Revver who’s only differentiator was it’s ability to help users cash in on advertising placed at the end of their videos.
You might call it YouTube 2.0 but I think if you put together the ability to share your videos with millions to actually generating some cash as well I think you’ve got a winning formula for sustainable growth. I had written about “talent following the money” and noted folks like Ask A Ninja, Ze Frank, lonelygirl15 and even the Eepy Bird folks behind the diet coke were putting their videos on Revver to generate some cash from their immense popularity. Revver of course could not match the traffic on YouTube, but it seemed that YouTube would grow the talent and once they had a following they would head of to make some money. If YouTube does this right it will surely consolidate it’s already enviable position.
In the end social media sites depend upon a motivated userbase, or at least a motivated base of the one percenters, and companies that figure out how to reward participation in a way that is congruent, and doesn’t undermine trust will prosper.
I just came across a site created by TBS, veryfunnyads.com that is essentially a social video network, kind of like YouTube but is 100% focused on funny commercials from around the world. Now if any company had created a general video sharing network I would have suggested they were out of their mind, but picking a very specific niche and building a brand around it is a very good idea, and I think TBS have made a very smart move here. I personally love commercials and have been a fan of video sites that shared them for a while, I certainly shed a tear when adcritic went for a subscription model.
Right now TBS does not enable the embedding of their videos in other blogs which I think an absolutely criminal decision, and my guess is some executive with no experience in social media decided they want to keep their site “sticky” so they don’t want their videos embedded in myspace pages or blogs. Very shortsighted IMHO. Apart from that I like their execution, and the videos are very funny. I personally can’t think of a better use for 30 second spots than turning them into 30 second jokes, I’ve always found european commercial to be much funnier, and generally smarter than American commercials which often tend to rely on volume (loudness), repetition (head on), and slagging off the competition. Obviously there are some wonderful American commercials but they appear to be very much in the minority. Advertising is often so repulsive on my television i would rather gouge my eyes out than watch another minute of them, especially the predatory ones that show up on later in the evening whether get rich quick schemes, or credit score stuff, fucking Ditech etc. etc.
Anyway, with that rant out of the way you should go and check out these two commercials one for marmite, and one for chocolate flavored condoms, fucking hysterical as opposed to very funny, (I should probably explain that marmite is a malt extract spread that is somewhat an acquired taste, loved by many, and the most repulsive thing ever to pass others lips, Australians have a similar love/hate affair with vegimite which is obviously the Aussies inferior interpretation of the British classic 
Link to chocolate flavored condoms
No, not because I work for Nokia, but because the it’s as close to everything I need in one package as i’ve ever seen. My friend Paul has one (because he is so much better connected here than I), and the thing totally blows me away. Here’s a demo of the GPS tool that is built into the N95 (and by the way gps maps and navigation for 100 countries are free, what you pay for is additional city guides etc), anyway, ignoring the corporate video style of this it does highlights how brilliant it will be to have GPS in your phone (although I think if everyone walks around paying wrapped attention to their phone a lot of people are going to be walking into one another).
Oh, and all your photo’s from the 5MP camera (with Carl Zeiss optics) are automatically geotagged so when you add them to a photo service like flickr all the location information as to where you took the pictures is embedded. Some other really nice features are it uses a standard headphone jack, and when a call comes in you can just use the phones mic, in combination with your headphones. It also uses microSD cards so you can add 2gigs of storage very easily (it’s got about 150 megs built in).
For a less PC look at the N95 please see Paul’s video where he berates one of the commenters on his blog (myphonerocks.com) that didn’t believe he had an N95 (I guest star as the cameraman on the N80). As an additional bonus you also catch a glimpse of the iPhone we were able to get hold of though our super secret channels.
On a personal note I’m really hoping that the N95 is going to be capable to play our next generation mobile games we’re working on, you can read more at our blog at blog.n-gage.com
The simplest way to describe the Robin Hood Fund is it’s kind of like Digg for wishes. You post a wish, and estimate how much it would cost to fulfill your wish, post it, and let the community vote on it and even contribute money toward the wish fund. At the end of the month the votes are tallied, the money collected and the top wishes are granted. There are two kinds of wishes, nice wishes and naughty wishes, nice ones are the “save the orphanage”, or I need $150 for the electric bill, and naughty are “I want a porsche” type, and the Robin Hood Fund caters to both.
Skeptical? Well this guy got $10,000 for video equipment based on this video wish, which is hysterical (in a very twisted dry kind of way).
Interestingly this idea is actually a product of a “crowdsourcing” company called Cambrian House (who I wrote about previously in “crowdsourcing and the wisdom of bloggers”), which collects business ideas and lets the community vote on which ones to create, and help build it. I think this could be one of Cambrian House’s first real blockbuster idea that got to market, giving the whole crowdsourcing idea a great deal of creedence.
My question is why don’t enormous companies do this internally? Wouldn’t a great product be an enterprise crowdsourcing app that continually captured ideas and let folks vote on what we should be building and how they want to contribute?
Related Crowdsourcing Articles:
Top Ten Crowdsourcing Companies
The Rise of the Crowdsourcing - Wired
I guess this is one of the side effects of crowdsourcing. I bet Lou Dobbs will be coming out against co-creation next
One thing that blows me away here though is that quite a few newspapers have successfully started to use blogs to stop the bleeding from their tree based business and it amazes me, considering how long Time Inc. has been trying to do “internet” that they aren’t taking a more blogcentric strategy. Instead of laying off all the editorial folks you could easily give each one a blog and tell them to run with it, and build a competitor to gawker or whatever.
Reading this ad age article just makes my blood boil:
Even Andrew Sulivan’s blog is a ghost town, 1 trackback on the whole page. I guess Time Inc. doesn’t want to hear from the Person of the Year.
Transforming the workforce and broadening digital capabilities, give me a break.
This video is hysterical as Ze demonstrates how playing with yourself is more satisfying with a wii. Ze also describes some new games that are coming soon.
On a side note, Ze has now got a talent agent and is heading to Hollywood, which probably means he’s going to end this year long daily video blog called theshow which we have all come to love.
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