The Social Media MBA Blog by Karl Long

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

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

LiveRail is a video advertising network that eschews the usual pre-roll and post-roll model to put the user in control, ad boxes are shown next to the video so the viewer can choose to click on the boxes to play the ad, see the example below.

I think this is a very good value proposition for advertisers as they only pay when there ad rolls. Personally i’m a huge fan of opt in advertising, I experience this when I’m fast forwarding on my tivo and sometimes back up to watch an ad i like. Geico cavemen anybody “it’s mother, i’ll put her on speaker”.

Currently it’s in an invite only beta, you can read a much more in depth analysis from Read/Write Web here.

Project Wonderful brings an innovative transparent auction model to banner advertising which works brilliantly for niche blogs and communities.

There are very few advertising options out there for niche focused blogs, community sites, etc. Most advertising options rely on a large predictable audience to compensate for the generally low relevance of the advertisements. This is diametrically opposed to what blogs produce which is a relatively small audience with a focus on a particular topic, with variable and unpredictable traffic patterns (like when you get on boingboing or the front page of digg).

Project Wonderful’s model is based on “Cost Per Day” where advertisers bid on spots on the web site, if their bid is the highest for a particular day, their ad shows up and they are billed for that day. Advertisers get to choose the shape, configuration, number of ads, starting bid, and then they can choose their approval options for the ads.

I set up 6 125×125 spots on my T-Shirt blog two days ago, and started the bidding at 50 cents a spot which would garner me $30 for the month, not a lot but I wanted to make sure the spots got filled quickly and trusted the market would do it’s work. The next day all the spots were filled (10 bids in total) and the price was now at $1 per day.

One of the really good things for advertisers and the publisher is Project Wonderful keeps historical stats on traffic, bid price and referrers over the previous month. Take a look at my T-shirt bidding page to get an idea.

Talk about Web2.0 mellodrama, Lonelygirl15 sacrificed in some weird cult ceremony, and apparently there are a lot more Lonelygirls out there that the cult is after, clearly Lonelygirl15 has outgrown the budget and they need some fresh blood. Interestingly the series finally was exclusively on myspace TV.

And fake steve jobs turns out to be a great strategy to sell books! Turns out it was Forbes editor Daniel Lyons.

Both contrived, fake, entertaining, watchable…. at least initially.

Ad Age has published the “power 150″, or the 150 “top” marketing, advertising and PR blogs. ExperienceCurve made the list at 140, so it’ll be interesting to see what the effects are.

The one thing that I hope comes out of people doing lists like these is encourage someone to start putting some tools out there that can help with the measurement and discovery of topical blogs. I personally wish that Technorati would pick up the ball here, they should have been the first to identify that there are different kinds of blogs and measurement in particular verticals would be extremely valuable.

(see also Peter Kims list of the top 20 marketer blogs, I do much better there

Kris over at ‘Cross The Breeze has some further critique of technorati’s apparent lack of innovation (ironically I had to dig through technorati to find that post of Kris’s because he had linked to me

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

Originally posted on tcritic.com

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

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.

From the aptly named Barely Political comes a trailer for the a new song and video:

Hat Tip to Steve at Adrants