Technorati lay-offs, CEO Sifry resigns. More on this later.
Kadoink the mobile social network via mashable - This looks very interesting, seems like you can use SMS as the primary interface to this social network see also Uncommon Uses - Text based interfaces
Thinking through facebook for marketers from Peter Kim
About a year ago Lord Maurice Saatchi, co-founder of the mega advertising agency Saatchi & Saatchi gave a speech at Cannes on the “death of modern advertising”. He followed this speech up with an article on the Financial Times of the same title. A year later Lord Saatchi is now creating a new division in the company that will be called “One Word Equity“, which is their response to advertising in the digital age.
Now on the point that modern advertising as we know it is if not dead, certainly in intensive care, i’m in total agreement with Lord Saatchi, where we differ is on what to do about it. To mine, and many others amazement Lord Saatchi’s solution was to outline a brand strategy to own “one word”, something he called “one word equity”. Here’s a segment from the FT article:
Each brand can only own one word. Each word can only be owned by one brand. Take great care before you pick your word. It is going to be the god of your brand.
To be quite honest this seems like a rehash of 90’s brand strategy right out of Ries and Trout “Positioning, Battle For The Mind”.
I personally think this is a strategic move by Saatchi to try and stay relevant by trying to redefine the problem with advertising, so you can still use advertising. Sort of advertising is dead, except for when your trying to gain one word equity, because believe me you need a lot of tv ads to own one word. I really think he is playing on “big brands” fears of “if advertising is dead WTF do I do next” and Saatchi’s “one word equity” has one big advantage, it’s incredibly simple to understand and will probably seem like a life preserver to a lot of top marketing folks at big brands.
Advertising isn’t dying because companies aren’t owning the right words, advertising is dead because companies have become transparent and porous. Consumers are no longer limited to discovering a companies products through company controlled channels and media, their finding out about products through other people, through wikis, blogs, podcasts, youtube, myspace, facebook, yelp, flickr, email, im, twitter, tumbler, google, delicious, pounce etc.
Anyway, Lord Saatchi is pretty committed to this idea, and in advertising agency tradition has put a big flash site together at onewordequity.com so you can go and immerse yourself in what they think, funny, there is no where to leave comments.
See what other bloggers think of this:
one funny side note do a search on google for “saatchi speech” and this is the number one result “Lord Saatchi’s ‘Death Of Advertising’ Speech Is ‘Utter Rubbish’”
Greg Verdino has been rallying some blog friends to weigh in on a survey on the topic of innovation. Jon Burg from Digitas asks the question “What is a one line definition of Innovation”.
This is my stab at it, borrowing heavily from the definition of creativity:
“innovation is the process or result of combining previously separate ideas or technologies in useful and valuable ways.”
What do you think? What does this overused word mean to you?
Jon’s going to post a summary on monday so look out for it.
It has recently occurred to me that a great many social networks, like myspace and facebook are essentially just blog templates, connected together, more difficult to modify, and more difficult to get your data out of. Personally i’m going to lobby that fimoculous.com turn itself into a social network in conjunction with wordpress, because as a template it kicks facebooks ass as a “life aggregator”.
I can just hear the cries now of “what about how open source facebook is with its facebook markup and developer program”, now how is facebooks crippled FBML, FQL and “roach motel” approach to your data better than fully developed languages and standards like xhtml, css, PHP, and mysql? I think Facebooks current value proposition is better for developers than it is users. Applications are certainly proliferating but 90% of them are useless.
Maybe i’m just burning out with having 4 different wall applications, including super wall, fun wall, and the wall.
For further argument along these lines you can also read “are social networks the AOL’s of Web2.0
In the past when media was broadcast it reached as many people as were watching at the time and then it was essentially gone. Sure it lived on in archives and was only seen again when it when a decision was made by the archive owner, probably a network, to rebroadcast it. Social Media, or media that is stored on the internet doesn’t have that gatekeeper, and in fact that media will reach people probably because another person shares it with them, I guess that’s the social part of it.
So watch this video of Dick Cheney 14 years ago explaining why it was not a good idea for the Americans to go into Baghdad, it’s the long tail in action in the most disturbing way.
The staff at Gmail put this video together showing off their video making, animation, dancing and bycling skills and they want users to finish it off. Quite a good way to do a video competition where you get to really set the tone and direction before asking for participation.
These video competitions are truly becoming the new “write in” competitions that marketers have done for years whether it was coming up with a new tag line or telling them in a hundred words why you like their product the best 
I’m actually surprised that a side effect of being included in various lists of top blogs from the viral garden top 25, to the Ad Age Power 150, to Peter Kim’s top 20 marketer blogs, has really got me thinking and participating in a fascinating conversation about blog metrics.
I’ve often thought that most tools that give us web metrics left missed a great deal of what makes blogs important and different. Traffic metrics like Alexa is used a lot but doesn’t account for people reading RSS who IMHO are probably a more engaged audience than people coming in from google or stumbleupon. Incoming links is what google and technorati use as an indicator of, but incoming links is really a measure of how important a blog is to other bloggers, so again not really the whole picture.
I really think Peter Kim has created a very thoughtful multimetric for his top 20 marketer blogs where he uses metrics to measure authority, attention and influence.
One interesting thing that came out in the comments was how to derive feedburner subscribers for blogs that don’t publish them. Seeing as it’s just a call to feedburner with the feedname as a variable you should be able to go and grab them all as long as the person uses feedburner
Here’s Peter’s list where i’m honored to be in the top spot… for the moment
So even the most edgy brand, especially condiment brand could possibly say their product has sperm in it, even as a joke so it’s a safe bet that this entry into the Heinz create your own ad competition will not make it to the finals. But it may be the most successful entry for Heinz, most watched, funniest, most human.
So is one of the advantages of UGC campaigns plausible deniability when something goes viral?
This ketchup video predates this competition by a year but still a classic.
Thanks Steve
Well the “people search engine” spock.com just launched and they are getting hit hard serving 300-400 pages per second, a little above the 100 page views a second they had predicted. And what’s the first thing you do when you get to spock.com, well search on your name of course.
It’s brilliantly simple and in many ways a service I didn’t even know I needed, as I was quite happy googling myself, until I tried spocking myself and I am a convert. Spock picks up various data about you and aggregates it into a search result, including known web sites, social networking profiles, tags etc. Funnily enough it only found my t-shirt blog tcritic and my linkedin profile which is a rather limited view of my online activity, but it is early days.
It seems to me that being careful with your online persona is going to become increasingly important, I noticed another Karl Long on my search result had some rather unfortunate tags:
It seems to me that spock is potentially a very big, very comprehensive social network dedicated to managing your identity.
Also check out their introduction to wikis.
Reminds me of the wonderful series of posts on Lifehacker called UltraNewb that are basic lifehacks for the non-nerds.
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