2007 April

Social Strategy & Design by @KarlLong

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Social Media Disrupts All Company Communication

I was inspired this morning by Daniel’s post on his Emergence Media blog titled Marketing Changes: CMOs, Evangelist, Social Media Programs, Website Strategy Positioning, it’s a very meaty article and worth a good read.

Longer Tail of Media Consumption
Increasing variety of media (mobile, social networks, search blogs, Xbox 360) that people are consuming means more effort required for marketing/brand/PR integration and more requirements for a “grand strategy” vision.
Marketing increased emphasis as a Revenue Driver
Increasing Trend Towards Measurement and ROI means that marketing will take high prominence in the C-level space, helping shape product development, internal culture and budgeting
Social Media as the Disruptor on the Web
Social affecting all of Interactive Marketing Activities, diversifying the types of media being consumed and making marketers have greater engagement with the customer audience and moving from brand control to brand management.

Great article, and it reiterated something for me and that is social media disrupts almost every communication mechanism a company has. Blogs, podcasts, tweets, etc all pierce the membranes that companies have been used to for the last 50 years, and connect everyone in ways that are unexpected, unplanned, and interesting.

I’m taking a leaf out of David Armano’s book here and attempting to illustrate my idea in a diagram, the thing i’m really trying to get across is that all aspects of a company is probably involved in social media in one way or another:

Social Media Disruption 01

Bare in mind this diagram is a vast simplification, first imagine there is probably an “…osphere” for every value creating function and support function in your company, and then overlay that with David Armano’s influence ripples diagram, and then imagine that extending in all 3 dimensions… I know, it’s pretty rad.

Ripples 2 1

I think I just Blue My Mind :-)

AdTech Redux

Great write up of the “trench warfare, blogs, podcasts etc” panel I was on.

Video recording of our panel that was streamed live via Ustream.com recorded by Jeremiah Owyang

Rohit Bhargava on Notes on the Vibe from Ad-Tech San Francisco

Steve Hall celebrates the Girls Of AdTech

Also Steve on lessons learned in the bathroom at AdTech

And ask a ninja co-creator Kent Nichols likes threadless

AdTech Keynote - Is Content King Again?

Interesting keynote/roundtable at AdTech this morning asking the question is content king again? Panlists include Suzie Reider, Head of Advertising for YouTube, Jason Hirschhorn, president Sling Media Group, Kourosh Karimkhany, General Manager Wired Digital, Caroline H. Little CEO and Publisher, Washingtonpost.com and Newsweek Interactive.

Suzie is really getting put on the spot about how they are going to enable advertisements, she’s talking about pre-roll intro and post roll ads, but she says they are experimenting right now. I think the whole pre/post roll debate represents a pretty unimaginative approach to advertising. Not sure why they can’t create a flash player template that includes some kind of advertising that’s integrated. Something like the bottom third they use in sports broadcasting. I think the most important question is how to make the advertising more relevant, video clips on youtube have lots of meta data that they should be taking advantage of. Even better, if a flash player can be smart enough to know what kind of site it’s embedded on could help drive what ads get shown.

Ooooh, Suzie says they are not trying to replicate TV advertising, she doesn’t want to create 30 second spots, they want better creative, better experience. She thinks we can get better metrics, better data, and better experience. Wow, she says look where tv commercials got us with users skipping commercials on dvr’s, you go girl. This was in response to someone stating that online video advertising is a drop in the bucket compared to television advertising.

Another question from the audience “what about people stealing my content”, Jason from sling media instead of trying to chase people down and be so combative, you should try and take advantage of these fans that cut up clips of tv shows and put them online.

Another question from the audience “does anyone else get confused when there are too many reviews”.

Hmmm, Suzie points out yelp as a great example of where hundreds of reviews are taken and presented in a more useful way. I’m kind of liking the way Suzie thinks.

Lot of conversation about disruption, user generated content, conversations and how “big media” needs to participate in these conversations. Caroline is taking issue with the ganging up on “big media”, says they are getting involved in the conversation, slowly.

Is content king? is conversation king? is the content enabling the conversation?

Adtech panel streamed and twittered

Jeremiah Owyang of the Web Strategy Blog is going to be streaming our panel discussion from adtech via a tool called Ustream. We’ve already been twittering it from myself, Jeremiah, and Kent Nichols (of askaninja fame).

The stream of our panel will go live at 4pm PST, in addition to the video there is a chat room there as well where we will be taking live questions, should be an interesting experiment.

“The Conversation Age” Collaborative Ebook is coming

Gavin Heaton and Drew McClellan started a project to collaboratively create an ebook written by 100+ bloggers, the topic The Age of Conversation. I’m one of the contributers and my chapter will be “viral games”, how big games and ARG’s are powerful tools for high engagement high involvement conversations. All proceeds from the sale of the eBook will go to Variety, the Children’s Charity.

Here’s the list of contributing authors:

Gavin Heaton
Drew McLellan
CK
Valeria Maltoni
Emily Reed
Katie Chatfield
Greg Verdino
Mack Collier
Lewis Green
Sacrum
Ann Handley
Mike Sansone
Paul McEnany
Roger von Oech
Anna Farmery
David Armano
Bob Glaza
Mark Goren
Matt Dickman
Scott Monty
Richard Huntington
Cam Beck
David Reich
Mindblob (Luc)
Sean Howard
Tim Jackson
Patrick Schaber
Roberta Rosenberg
Uwe Hook
Tony D. Clark
Todd Andrlik
Toby Bloomberg
Steve Woodruff
Steve Bannister
Steve Roesler
Stanley Johnson
Spike Jones
Nathan Snell
Simon Payn
Ryan Rasmussen
Ron Shevlin
Roger Anderson
Bob Hruzek
Rishi Desai
Phil Gerbyshak
Peter Corbett
Pete Deutschman
Nick Rice
Nick Wright
Mitch Joel
Michael Morton
Mark Earls
Mark Blair
Mario Vellandi
Lori Magno
Kristin Gorski
Krishna De
Kris Hoet
Kofl Annan
Kimberly Dawn Wells
Karl Long
Julie Fleischer
Jordan Behan
John La Grou
Joe Raasch
Jim Kukral
Jessica Hagy
Janet Green
Jamey Shiels
Dr. Graham Hill
Gia Facchini
Geert Desager
Gaurav Mishra
Gary Schoeniger
Gareth Kay
Faris Yakob
Emily Clasper
Ed Cotton
Dustin Jacobsen
Tom Clifford
David Pollinchock
David Koopmans
David Brazeal
David Berkowitz
Carolyn Manning
Craig Wilson
Cord Silverstein
Connie Reece
Colin McKay
Chris Newlan
Chris Corrigan
Cedric Giorgi
Brian Reich
Becky Carroll
Arun Rajagopal
Andy Nulman
Amy Jussel
AJ James
Kim Klaver
Sandy Renshaw
Susan Bird
Ryan Barrett
Troy Worman

Google Celebrates April 20th With A New Logo

google420.jpg

Wow, those guys are liberal :-)

Experience As Story Telling - Ira Glass

“What is a story in it’s purest form? The power of the anecdote. Raising questions at the beginning, constantly raising questions and answering them.” Reminds me of what someone told me about great animation, the process of tension and release. I wonder if the same thing goes for games? On a side note, i’ve listened to Ira Glass for years on This American Life, but I had never seen him before, I must say his voice totally matches his look and demeanor.

The big message for podcasters is in part 3 where Ira talks about early creative works that are disappointing often lead to people giving up. To demonstrate he plays a clip from his eighth year of broadcasting and proceeds with some brutal critique, but the point being, he went on to create great work. Maybe the same goes for blogs? I know many people start and give up?

Anyway, great stuff for everyone in these clips.

And Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4

Tip of the hat to coudal partners

Myspace Launches “Digg Killer” Tomorrow

So according to Mashable Myspace is launching news.myspace.com tomorrow. It supposed to feature the same kind of crowdsourcing features that Digg does, and considering the traffic that myspace has it could become a quite a competitor.

Some people have already commented that it seemed like a strange time to make a launch announcement, some are even speculating that they are launching to take advantage of the news frenzy around the Virgina shootings. Even a rumour of that could be quite damaging especially considering the community on myspace.

UPDATE: I’ve now seen the fabled myspace news and it underwhelms in so many ways. Dear Myspace HIRE A FUCKING DESIGNER!

Blogger Outreach Done Right - The Nikon Blog Ambassador Program

I think Nikon and their agency MWW Group are doing an extraordinary job engaging with the blogosphere and have just heard about their blog ambassador program through Mack Collier of the Viral Garden, and BL Ochman of the What Next Blog. With this program i think Nikon provide a very good example of how to get extremely valuable devices in the hands of bloggers without a hint of the cronyism or accusations of undue influence that have often come along with $1000+ giveaways to bloggers.

Essentially Nikon has sent their D80 10 megapixal SLR (with the 18-135 lens) to about 50 bloggers with the understanding that the bloggers have the camera on a long term loan of about 6 months. The genius part is that after 6 months the blogger then has three options:

  1. send it back to Nikon
  2. apply to extend for another 6 months
  3. purchase the camera at an editorial discount with the funds going toward photographic education programs

Simple, not rocket science but brilliant. What’s better than a PR campaign with a bit of heart, and everyone comes out smelling like roses. Although I do agree with BL on her point about Nikon not focusing enough on building an ongoing community around these programs, like the “Stunning Gallery” program they did previously with the heavy Flickr users, sure they got a lot of pretty pictures and a cool web site, but where was the ongoing conversation?

Anyway Nikon, don’t worry about me, i’ve been a happy D80 Owner for about 3 months and I absolutely love the camera, all I need is a D200 and a 400mm 2.8 lens :-)

karl d80.jpg

Coke and Second Life - More Social Media and CGC Experiments

DancingexperienceCoke is working with new marketing company Crayon to launch a competition in Second Life, the name of the project is VirtualThirst and involves the general public and residents of Second Life designing Coke vending machines that deliver “experiences”. As it turns out you can submit ideas as written descriptions, images, videos, or of course jump in world and design “drop” your design off at their location in SL. I’m pretty sure that this will do better than their video competition megaflop “the coke show”, to start with they have gone to a place where people are creating stuff already, and are trying to connect with “creatives” there. I’m not sure this passes my “who cares” test, but I guess that will depend on the output of participants. In many ways “design a new coke vending machine that vends experiences” smacks of something that sounds great to marketers, and a huh? from the general populous… maybe.

"imagine a world in which a simple vending machine could dispense - not Coca-Cola - but the ESSENCE of Coca-Cola: refreshment, joy, unity, experience"

Seriously? who talks like that and who believes that the essence of coke is refreshment, joy, unity, experience; apart from the vp of marketing.

Anyway, what have they done right:

  • They’ve gone to where people are creating
  • They’ve involved the community in the judgeing
  • They are going to let people use the winning in Second Life for free in their homes etc
  • the publicity they get from just doing something in Second Life will be an additional return on investment

They also have a myspace page, delicious page, flickr page, and a youtube page

Other coverage:

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