ExperienceCurve by Karl Long

Loved this t-shirt that Vintage Vantage mailed me, thought it was quite appropriate to cross post.

Originally posted on tcritic.com

I must admit Yelp.com is one of my favorite and most useful social networking sites ever. Myspace, twitter, pownce, facebook often seem like little more than voyeuristic, navel gazing, echo chambers and don’t actually create anything of lasting value and would be easily replaced if they disappeared tomorrow. Yelp on the other hand is co-creating value over time, every review adds to the value of the whole. Anyway, what prompted this rant is that Yelp is now allowing companies to sponsor customers reviews, and this really enables companies to sponsor stuff they couldn’t really say themselves, case in point:

1. the demo - “stain remover”
2. show the problem - “i’ve fallen and I can’t get up”
3. symbolize the problem - cold symptoms turn person into ogre
4. symbolize the benefit - laxative and old faithful
5. comparison - sh
6. exemplary story - the vw crashing ad
7. benefit causes story - Axe effect
8. testimonial - real people losing weight
9. ongoing charecters or celebs - Taco bell dog, or cavemen
10. associated user imagery - people you want to hang out with, nike
11. unique personality property - apple genius commercials, or dyson for the vaccuum
12. parody or borrowed format - geico small house ad

see the video here on Slate

I wonder where viral falls into this? Where would the Ka’s Evil Twin fall? Or the Eppy Birds diet coke and mentos experiment? I think the Smirnoff Tea Partay is pretty much the “parody or borrowed format”.

Sorry for the dashed off post, i’m just getting ready to leave, but I thought this was very interesting.

via fimoculous

ChoreWars is an interesting service that uses the XP (experience point) concept that drives MMORPG (Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games) like world of warcraft, and is turning it to housework, or other unpleasant tasks. On the site you can form a create a character, form a party, and assign various tasks to characters who get points based upon their completion of tasks.

I’ve often thought that if life was more like a game I might do better at it

Your Skill In Reading Has Increased By 1 Point by Reading This Blog Post

And my blogging skill has improved by 1 point, I now have the ability to cast “Link Bate” level 2.

Funilly enough I have heard of some ideas for productivity tools, like plugins for Outlook that would rate give you experience points for your email usage and mad emailing skilz.

Hat tip to mashable and tcritc for the t-shirt, yes that’s right I just hat tipped myself.

Well the interweb was buzzing last night with the news that Nokia has acquired a social media sharing site Twango, which is a “multi media” sharing site that can handle 101+ file types from video, pictures, mp3’s etc.

i’ve set up an account there to try out and it looks pretty interesting, one thing i will say the multi file drag and drop is killer, here’s a screenshot where I dragged videos and photos on the same window and uploaded them all together, no muss no fuss. Not sure if that’s the killer app, but it was a damn sight easier than going to two sites and uploading all the files together.

It seems to me that the technology is rock solid and what needs work is the stewarding of the culture that will drive this social network.

Here’s my fav pic from the motoGP last weekend:

HUGE DISCLAIMER: Yes I work for Nokia, but this is my personal opinion, i’m not connected in any way with the Twango work (although I’m not saying I wouldn’t like to hint hint

Oh, and PS with Mashable, Readwriteweb, and GigaOM on it where the hell is techcrunch in all this? Did they not bother covering it because they didn’t scoop it?

Now Toddands Power 150 is going to not only be hosted at Ad Age, but they will be taking over management and growth of it using Todd’s “multi metric” methodology. This is pretty amazing news for anyone on the top 150 (i’m hanging on at 126 somewhere), as Ad Age will i’m sure be promoting it’s new “acquisition”.

“Top X lists” and lists of “top blogs” have become a kind of currency in the marketing blogospere in the last year or so from the viral gardens top 25 to Toddands “power 150″ to Peter Kim’s top 13 marketer blogs. In some ways “top X blogs” was like the web site awards that proliferated in the late 90’s, hey you’ve one an award in the form of this gif, stick it in your side bar etc. but taking my cynical hat off for a second i think these “top x blog” lists filled an important gap in the blogosphere in the form of metrics for very specific niche blogs (nlogs? bliches?).

IMHO Ad Age taking over the Power 150 represents a pretty amazing blogosphere to mainstream media cross over. In many ways Todd was filling a gap by rating these sites and providing a scoreboard for a particular niche, in this case marketing, and now Ad Age is interested in rating blogs just decided to acquire Todd’s methodology and take it over.

My question is why hasn’t technorati or another smart programmer developed a way to put together these lists or scoreboards using multiple metrics in particular niches? Great i’m in the technorati top 10K, so fucking what, it just means I’m less popular than BoingBoing, and I didn’t need a web site to tell me that.

Well i’m heading out for a couple of days and will be offline, i’m going to Laguna Seca in Monterey to watch the Moto GP (motorcycle racing). Anyway I had to post this t-shirt before I left - Viral Marketing Doesn’t Work - Tell Everyone You know - brilliant and ironic, not sure if it’s funny to people who are not marketing geeks. What would be even funnier is if this got dugg and ended up on the front page of digg (fingers crossed

Anyway, have a great weekend, I may post some stuff from my phone if I find some good T’s at the racing. Somehow I think racetracks are a rich source of ironic shirts, although I would probably do better in that regard at Nascar.

BTW I found the viral marketing t-shirt via Jeremiah’s twitter feed

Apparently you can get the shirt here but the site is down right now
trigger leads

Arun Rajagopal has been researching the authors of the Age of Conversation, and he’s doing a bang up job. It’s really interesting to see all the things these authors are doing and have done. He’s working his way through writing a more detailed profile of each of the 104 authors and I only found it through him linking to another one of my blogs.

Anyway, the book has raised about $3000 so far and is number 5 on the Lulu.com top seller list this week.

So strange to wish that this man would blend something of mine

Actually the point of this post is to marvel at the longevity of the idea behind the Blend Tec line of videos. They started over a year ago blending unlikely things like garden rakes, marbles etc. But now they’ve realized they can continue to stay relevant by blending newsworthy items. This is the perfect viral marketing mechanism because it’s a simple formula that can be continually repeated with items in the news. The will it blend iPhone video is number 4 on the viral video charts, and that’s quite an impressive feat for the 55th video doing essentially the same thing. Check out the WillItBlend.com website.

Another recent culturally relevant blending was of course of a Transormers.

When was the last time you got something in your mail box from a friend saying that you have to see a viral video or web site because it was so funny or brilliant or shocking, and it turned out it was actually from a company? Only a couple come to mind for me tea partay, and the Grand Theft Auto inspired Coke commercial have shown up in my mail box.

They of course pale in comparison to independent creations like Hitler getting banned from xbox live or Maddox’s take on the iPhone (this got dugg over 13,000 times in about 48 hours). Now that’s viral.

Sure, companies generally are terrified of controversy, is it because they are hamstrung by branding theory developed in the 50’s. Would we stop buying brands that had a bit more of a sense of humor? That maybe didn’t take themselves so seriously?

Microsoft made a brilliant video mocking it’s own design process, I actually think I liked Microsoft more after seeing it, it somehow humanized them, and there work with Hugh of gapingvoid is another step in humanizing Microsoft. It seems that in the age of conversation companies should be figuring out how to speak in a more human voice, so sayeth the clue train.