Social Media Strategy & Engagement Marketing by Karl Long

Link to the interview page

I have a great deal of respect for both Nathan Shedroff, the interviewee and Steve Portigal the interviewer so i recommend checking out the interview. Nathan wrote the seminal book on Experience Design of the same title, and has a web site full of resources at nathan.com (which is ironically a bewildering experience). One of the thing they delve into in this interivew is the “meaning” of experience, which seems to be the next phase of Nathan’s exploration, and the topic of his upcoming book.

Steve Portigal is an experienced ethnographer, customer research, design strategy guy and you should check out his site and blog as well.

so i’m part of a team at Nokia doing a team building event, this involves making an “interactive online dining experience”. Believe it or not, we’re in an apartment in the financial district of San Francisco with a pile of lumber, to build the table, some wifi access, a flickr account, a blog and $1,000 for food and drink. It’s a little more fun than the normal teambuidling event, and we’ve put a blog up to track our progress and get peoples feedback:
http://onlinedinner.wordpress.com

Anyway, we’ve got 20 people working on this right now, with lots of camera phones, some people are shopping, some people posting to the blog, some people uploading to youtube. Anyway, we’re in San Francisco, we should try and have drinks after, we’re in the financial district…

I have no idea, but he’s on the speaker lineup at the EconSM (economics of social media) conference put on by Paidcontent.org, being held on April 27th in Beverly Hills. Carson stands out amongst a mixed bag of speakers. Some people I would like to hear from on the economics of social media like the CEO of Bebo and Netvibes, but the there seem to be a lot of speakers from big media as well, Fox Interactive, CBS Interactive, Walt Disney Interactive… maybe they’ll be talking about the economics of buying innovative startups and crushing the life out of them.

Ok, I am a bit of a cynic, but I do think this will be a great conference, and they have a pretty good explanation of why Carson is going to be there.

Some people I would add to their list - Stowe Boyd, anyone from Skinny corp (builders of threadless.com, makes 18M a year off t-shirts) anyone from Technorati, Six Apart, any wiki startups that are making money, flickr, Nish from Yelp.com, someone from CambrianHouse.com (they’ve created a couple of startups from crowdsourcing). Any others?

and from the 7up faq

Jeez, do you think they can say 100% natural any more frequently, do they think that if they repeat the statement enough times it will make it true? I’m sorry but 100% natural is right up there with “checks in the mail” and “don’t worry i’ll pull out”. Seriously, anything with High Fructose Corn Syrup is not a natural product, that’s like saying petroleum is natural.

from wikipedia

I’m not sure what happened here, seems like someone is already on top of this:

I’m currently reading the Omnivores Dilemma which is a great book, but you will start paying attention to ingredient labels.

This is a brilliant video that has been viewed over 1.2 million times and get this, it was put together by an assistant professor of cultural anthropology at the Kansas State University.

Link for feedreaders

Was he really talking about social media or Social Media? I think so.

Tip of the Hat shinyshiny.tv

I was really impressed this Sunday when I read Stowe Boyd’s post on “what is Social Media“, the man has a wonderful talent for clarity and cuts through the bullshit like a hot knife through butter. Stowe’s post was a response to a question by Dare Obasanjo who seems confused as to what social media is.

In his article Stowe makes a very important distinction between Social Media, in capitals, and social media, in lower case. The lower case social media referring to blogs, wiki’s and the tools that create or form the platform for Social Media.

In the case of Social Media i’m just going to quote a big chunk of Stowe’s article:

Couple of nice terms I pulled out of his article

Edglings - The people making things happen at the edges

and the audience, are “The-people-formerly-known-as-the-audience”

I think an important thing to bare in mind is that because social media is the tools that the edgelings use to communicate that social media is very fluid and will grow and change over time. If we were all able to create videos as easily as blog posts from our phones and the video was machine readable, for keyword indexing etc then maybe video would become the dominant form of social media. But right now are current set of tools favor text over anything else.

Resonance Partnerships has a lengthy response to a few different articles, including Stowe’s which is a good read.

I have noted a couple of times before that Nokia sent out phones and internet tablets in the past to some bloggers. Most were pretty cool with it, some questioned it’s ethics, and I certainly didn’t see any of the every negative reactions that the Vista laptop “give away” kerfuffle produced.

As a blogger who get’s sent stuff on occasions, mostly books and t-shirts, I do wonder what the best way is to approach this process and how to get the most out of it. I really liked the criteria that Gaping void had for sending out wine to bloggers, their criteria was simple and clear, although again, that’s a $20 bottle of wine, and i’m talking about $500 devices here.

Beyond bloggers could you actually work with other kinds of communities, like Nikon did with Flickr? How about giving some devices to top contributers, or the Elite on Yelp, helping them take pictures or do video reviews of restaurants? And what are you building here? Positive WOM? Finding some “lead users”? Seeding the 1 percenters?

What are your thoughts? If your a blogger and you got an Nseries “multimedia computer” in the mail what would you do with it? How would you feel about it? Obligated? Bribed? Important? Valued? I know when I get a book or t-shirt in the mail I feel like a valued person, and somewhat obligated to write something.

I’m going to tag some bloggers that I would like to hear from on this:

David Armano David’s response is here with some very interesting conversation
Shel Holtz
Neville Hobson
Steve Rubel
Mack Collier
Greg Verdino I really like how Greg has focused on the “community activation” aspect of my question
Tom Coates
Ben McConnell & Jackie Hubba

Other responses:
Rohit at Influential Interactive Marketing gives a thoughtful response here

Please note that this post and this blog is my own personal opinion and does not represent the views of my employer

It happens to people, it happens to ideas, it happens to blogs, it happens to businesses, innovation and talent is coming from the edges. The means to try, the means to invent, the means to fail and try again is available to anyone with an internet connection and increasingly they are ones willing to try new things.

Anyway, I posted a while ago to a little comedy video, kind of spinal tap meets Brittany Spears, called Teenie Weenie that was done by a youtuber called Lisa Nova. Anyway, I just found out that she got hired by MadTV as a cast member and her first sketch will be on this weekend, February 17th. Sure, she’s not the first, the lonely island guys got a gig on SNL for instance, but I think the trend of talent and innovation coming from the edges is going to have increasingly powerful effects on business and media over the coming years. This is only just beginning.

link for feedreaders

Most business cards in this world are a wasted opportunity, and often a waste of space. I just met with Noah Brier, a blogger/creative/strategist from NYC and was so impressed with his business card I had to take a picture of it, at least the back of it. Noah just joined an interesting agency called Naked, and is one of the co-founders of Like Mind, the social media coffee morning that is happening in various cities now. (NOTE Likemind SF is coming up on February 16th at Cafe De La Presse, 352 Grant Ave., corner of Grant and Stockton, SF 8AM)

I think i’m going to have to get one of these made up and add a couple of venues:

I met Karl at…

Conference
Office
Restaurant
Strip club
Pub
Finland
MySpace
Xbox Live

Nike has done some very exciting things with its Nike + campaign. If you’re not familiar basically Nike has created a little device (an accelerometer you put in your shoe) for the iPod nano that reports back how far you have run, your pace etc. You can then upload all that data to the nike site and it creates goals for you, and tracks your progress. They have done a good job of developing a sort of co-creative atmosphere, but it’s done in a very polished, monolithic way that does not give the community many creative options. Surely the real power here could be unleashed with a couple of api’s an easy ways for people grab the data and use it in other ways.

The other thing that drives me nuts is the desire to try and fit this all in a specific screen size, yes it’s all in flash, and no it doesn’t scale. Here’s a screenshot of the cool tool where people can share their routes (by manually plotting it out on a google map thing):

And here’s that cool tool in the context of the actual screen real estate I have on my lap top:

Great idea? Absolutely. Award winning design? Of Course. Did it test well in front of focus groups? Indupidably. Is it a pain in the ass when you start to try and use it? You bet.