I just got quoted in the Marin Independent Journal from a panel I was on this week. The quote they chose to use was:
“The move toward social media is as big a change as Gutenberg and the printing press,” said Karl Long, a product manager at Nokia. “Social media is the ability for anyone to publish anything without any cost.”
and of course to potentially reach anyone online.
So what do you think? Hyperbole?
Interestingly Steven Fry and the BBC recently put online a 60 minute show called The Machine That Made Us that is all about the Gutenberg press and how it changed the world.
So in 50 or 100 years will there be a documentary about how the internet changed us? I wonder what it will be called? The Machine That Distracted Us? The Machine That Got Us Laid? The Machine That Got Us Jobs? The Machine That Connected Us? The Machine That Democratized Everything? The Machine That Made Culture Global?
Political? Maybe, but I think if Lawrence Lessig does run for congress it will be one of the most significant political moves marketed and enabled through the internet and social media, a truly grass roots effort. He may be running for the 12th district in California but he would be IMHO the Congressman for the district of the internet, as founder of the creative commons, and being on the board of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. In many ways the amount of support I think Lessig will get from the web this may well turn into first global campaign to get a congressman elected
Freedom of the press is limited to those who own one.
A. J. Liebling
(1904 - 1963)
The Black Eyed Peas recently did a music video which was a mashup with Barak Obama’s “Yes we can speech” and has been watched by over 4 million people. This parody called “No we can’t” mashes up John McCain sound bites in a similar fashion.
For more on interweb presidential politics check out Techpresident.com
When I first saw the link on twitterFimoculous with the title “Is the Tipping Point Toast?” I thought someone was going to debunk the whole idea behind it. But what was being debunked was just the concept of roles of people involved in making a trend “tip”, and most importantly the influencer’s. Sounds terrifying to most marketers because the whole idea of finding and cultivating influencers is often the cornerstone of “seeding” viral/WOM campaigns, and as they say in the article marketers spend millions on this process.
The article is on fast company and key point of the article though is to point out that it is not the people spreading an idea that matter as much as the idea itself, and societies readiness for the idea. I think this is one of the reasons that ideas that are laser focused on a niche often succeed, it’s because the idea can be much more finely tuned to appeal the people who will initially receive it. Once it is successful in that very small niche it’s likely you will have the critical mass to get out to the broader audience you seek. It’s kind of like starting a fire, the niche is the kindling
Watts believes this is because a trend’s success depends not on the person who starts it, but on how susceptible the society is overall to the trend–not how persuasive the early adopter is, but whether everyone else is easily persuaded. And in fact, when Watts tweaked his model to increase everyone’s odds of being infected, the number of trends skyrocketed.
“If society is ready to embrace a trend, almost anyone can start one–and if it isn’t, then almost no one can,” Watts concludes. To succeed with a new product, it’s less a matter of finding the perfect hipster to infect and more a matter of gauging the public’s mood. Sure, there’ll always be a first mover in a trend. But since she generally stumbles into that role by chance, she is, in Watts’s terminology, an “accidental Influential.”
So don’t let all the talk about social objects make you think that marketing is all about the props. The props are great if they spark relationships, and they may look important as markers of relationships… but they’re not the real magic.
Found this video on Jonnie Moore’s always thought provoking blog. It’s a collaboration of 200 students in an anthropology class that looks at the defining characteristics of students today.
It certainly seemed bleak in many ways, and illustrated how the modern school system of lecture halls and chalkboards were antiquated, but what surprised me is how much the web was mentioned but mainly in the context of facebook. Isn’t there a wealth of information out there on the web, what of wikipedia, or the mountains of blogs out there written by smart, thoughtful people, if they were anthropology students weren’t they reading Grant McCracken? I’m just saying, how many of them were blogging, podcasting, putting videos on youtube? Well actually they are all blogging at http://mediatedcultures.net/ksudigg/?p=119″>mediatedcultures.net, and of course they put this video up on youtube which has been viewed almost 1.5 million times, and they used a wiki like service to edit the document to put the script together for the project, so thankfully it did go beyond facebook
Just saw the new Jack Black/Mos Def movie “Be Kind, Rewind” last night and I loved it, the director also did Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless mind and this movie had a similar quirky quality. Apart from being a very funny movie, it had a wonderfully positive message about creativity, that creativity doesn’t have to be perfect, and sometimes we just have to do something and see what happens.
Without giving too much away the movie is about two guys who are looking after a video store who accidently erase all the tapes, their solution to this is of course to shoot their own versions of the movies over the old tapes with of course very crappy, but very funny results. The resultant home made movie has been, in their words “Sweded”, here’s their explanation:
Here are a couple of movie parody t-shirts which seemed appropriate. These two are both from Last Exit To Nowhere which I Featured once before, and believe me the Robocop reference is entirely appropriate.
And these two are from a new line of movie inspired t-shirts from Kindred Clothing which are wonderfully creative mashups or sweded t-shirts, almost homages.
Of course they are also running a youtube competition for people to create their own sweded movies:
I’m going to broadcast some live video from my N95 in a minute using a tool called Qik, the video also has a chat window. Not sure how compelling the content will be, just a quick experiment.
UPDATE: I’m not sure it ended up showing on the blog, but it was working on my Qik site and we even got some messages from someone in Germany, showed up right on the screen as we were recording.
Ok, i’ve set up my own qik url qik.com/tcritic, looks like the embedded video i did just shows what is live. You can see a recording of what we did here qik.com/video/11006
I’ve thought for many years that web design emerged from an awkward pairing of software design and print/magazine design. Practitioners have certainly moved it along but it still boggles my mind how badly some agencies screw up web design, and how some “award winning” designs fail in so many real world ways.
Anyway, I don’t have an answer but I can tell you this article Understanding Web Design from my old friend Jeffrey Zeldman is probably the smartest thing I’ve read on the topic of web design in the last couple of years.
A couple of gems:
Architecture (the kind that uses steel and glass and stone) is also an apt comparison—or at least, more apt than poster design. The architect creates planes and grids that facilitate the dynamic behavior of people. Having designed, the architect relinquishes control. Over time, the people who use the building bring out and add to the meaning of the architect’s design.
Web design is the creation of digital environments that facilitate and encourage human activity; reflect or adapt to individual voices and content; and change gracefully over time while always retaining their identity.
Eyelesswriter.com called up Verizon 56 times to ask two questions about their data rates and recorded the conversations. Only 1 out of 56 reps got both questions right.
I had written previously that Guiness had hidden an ad online that people could find by picking up clues from various online videos. Well this is the commercial that everyone was looking for and it’s a fun ad for sure, by the same director that did the Bravia Balls commercial.
I’m sure it cost Guiness quite a bit more to create this competition to find it’s ad, but I think the payoff is they engaged a lot of people in the puzzle, which gives a good basis for sharing this ad above and beyond the cool ad itself. They have succeeded to some extent in turning this ad into a social object by imbuing it with some extra context, in other words something to talk about… which is what i’m doing now.
It shouldn’t be underestimated the amount of activitiy a challenging game can create. I followed it quite closely because I was actually linked to in the “trailhead” post on the ARG aficionado web site Unfiction. It’s a facinating read if you want to see how the clues were uncovered and the arc that this puzzle took, there are about 1500 posts on that one thread of people trying to figure out the clues. Even better you can go the the Juan Ramon wiki where they have documented a walkthrough of the game. Great source of information and ideas if you’re interested in starting your own game. The one take away, you can not make these difficult enough
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