The Social Media MBA Blog by Karl Long

Guinness has added a little twist to its latest advertising campaign and have hidden it online somewhere for someone to find. In good old ARG (alternate reality game) tradition they have started this game off with a couple of clues, in this case a fictional Mayor called Juan Ramon has put a video on youtube and created a pdf letter to share.

The pdf seems to have some writing hidden in it that alludes to some dates and times, who knows maybe there is even clues as to a prize or something, you would hope

Here’s a link to the pdf

It will be interesting to see how this unfolds, I’m also interested in if they actually hired an ARG type agency as well as the ad agency.

Some more posts on ARG’s as marketing tools:
Nine Inch Nails ARG
Beyond Viral Marketing, engagement, narrative and passion
More on ARG’s

So in the first week Radiohead’s album, In Rainbows, which they allowed customer to set their own prices sells 1.2 million downloads and gets an average of $8 each. Next time I’ll just ask them to up the bitrate a little bit.

Funny to think of this in co-creation terms but guess what, it is. Radiohead just put their customers in charge of pricing, just like Ikea puts you in charge of logistics and assembly. Guess what, putting your customers in charge of pricing of goods where you have close to zero marginal costs is a very good idea. If saves you from making big errors in pricing, and as long as you sell enough to cover your sunk costs you will never lose money. And think of all the money you save through not having over-engineered DRM, not suing your customers, not spending money on anti piracy ads.

Oh, and when you don’t DRM your stuff, and don’t sue your customers they make amazing things for you like this 1 million key frame animation to Radiohead’s song Creep, it’s amazing (thanks Ze)

How about it Ze, set your own price for downloads of theshow2.0?

Via

While the Web 2.0 Summit is going on another conference is going on called PopTech, think of it as a bit more of a liberal Arts conference as opposed to the tech driven Web 2.0 summit.

Interestingly though Poptech is being a bit more web 2.0 about their conference and broadcasting the whole thing live at poptech.org/live/. Check it out, they’ve got some extraordinary speakers, and it’s going on NOW! The only way they could make this better is if they archived it so you could go back and watch specific speakers (ooops, they already do that right here at poptech popcasts), just like TED, if you want to make yourself smarter today check out their archived “talks”. BTW BoingBoing is liveblogging poptech as well.

UPDATE: Web 2.0 Summit are releasing some of their videos on blip.tv

• Victoria Hale, founder of the world’s first non-profit drug company, will share her work on fighting malaria and other illnesses.
• Nina Jablonski, the renowned anthropologist, will share her work studying the biology and meaning of human skin.
• Jessica Jackley Flannery, Internet microfinance pioneer, will discuss the future of ‘bottom up’ solutions to poverty.
• Van Jones, inner-city eco-activist, will speak about his work on a new “green collar” revolution in America’s inner cities.
• Chris Jordan, the celebrated photographer, will share his breathtaking photographs which document of the human impact.
• Sarah Joseph, the founder of Emel magazine, Britain’s leading Muslim lifestyle publication, will discuss emerging dialogues within the Islamic community.
• Steven Pinker, the preeminent cognitive scientist and New York Times-best-selling author will speak on the nature and essence of human thought.
• Paul Polak, founding father of market-based solutions to poverty and development, will speak about his efforts to built ultra-low-cost products for the bottom of the global pyramid.
• Jay Keasling, one of the founding fathers of synthetic biology, will share his path-breaking work on new health and energy technologies.
• Jonathan Harris, the mind-blowing interactive design star, will share his breathtaking work.
• Ted Ames, the Macarthur-Award-Winning ecologist and Maine lobsterman, will share his work creating sustainable approaches to our management of the oceans.
• Tom Barnett, the geopolitical and military strategist and best-selling author, who will explore America’s strategic challenges in the next 25 years.
• Sam Barondes, the renowned neuropsychiatrist who will discuss the essence of human personality — what it is, where it comes from, and how it makes us who we are.
• Robert Boroffice, head of Nigeria’s space agency, NASRDA, who will speak about how satellite technology can connect Africa.
• Adrian Bowyer, creator of low-cost, open-source fabrication technologies will speak about how this breakthrough technology can be used to empower ordinary citizens around the world.
• Louann Brizendine, neuropsychiatrist and expert on gender differences in the brain, will share her provocative work on how men and women truly do think differently.
• Mustapha Ceric, Grand Mufti of Bosnia and leading Islamic thinker, will speak about global peace.
• Caleb Chung, legendary toy designer and inventor of the Furby, will share his latest “artificially alive,” animatronic creation.
• Cary Fowler, the world’s seed banker and director of the Global Seed Diversity Trust, will share his efforts to create a “global seed vault” deep in a mountain in Norway.
• Vanessa German, the urban slam poet will inspire us.
• Dan Gilbert, the psychologist and best-selling author, will discuss human happiness and why we rarely hold on to it.
• Krista Dong, MD, a front-lines AIDS worker in South Africa, will speak about an inspiring new initiative to help HIV+ people in the poorest communities.
• John Legend, the Grammy Award-winning R&B artist, will perform and share his work on global poverty alleviation.
• Joe McCarthy, global mobility researcher, will share his insights into how mobile devices are empowering people around the world.
• Christian Nold, a technology artist, will demonstrate his work on “emotional mapping” technologies that show how people react to places.
• Claire Nouvian, the noted deep-sea conservationist, will share some of her breathtaking work documents the deepest layers of the biosphere.
• Alan Dugatkin, an expert in animal behavior will share his insights into the biological underpinnings of human goodness.
• Nathan Eagle, the mobility expert from the MIT Media Lab, will share his research on the use of mobiles as a tool for social development.
• John Esposito, the preeminent Islamic-studies scholar, will lead a discussion on the history and future of Islam.
• Jeff Fisher, the healthcare psychologist will share his work on a promising new software tool in the fight in the fight against HIV.
• Jessica Hagy, superbly comic blogger will share her hilarious illustrations.
• Carl Honoré, celebrated journalist and chronicler of the Slow Food movement, will speak about the new dynamics of human culture.
• Zainab Salbi, the founder of Women for Women International, will share lessons from her efforts helping women in post-conflict regions.
• Bill Shannon, the indescribably talented street dancer will speak and perform.
• John Shearer, technology entrepreneur, will share his potentially breakthrough ways of distributing electricity.
• Paul Shuper, psychologist and HIV behavioral researcher, will share his work on a promising new software tool in the fight in the fight against HIV.
• Elizabeth Streb, the award-winning choreographer will share her visions.
• Charles Swift, the Navy lawyer charged with defending terrorists at Guantanamo, will share lessons on balancing human rights with security in the post 9/11 world.
• Zinhle Thabethe, the front-line AIDS worker from KwaZulu Natal province, South Africa, will return to Pop!Tech to announce a significant new initiative to fight the epidemic in her home country.
• Katrin Verclas, mobile activism researcher, will share her research on the many ways mobiles are being used a tool for social change.
• Zoë Keating, the mesmerizing techno-cellist, will perform for us.
• Sheila Kennedy, the architect and product designer, will relate her work on breakthrough new lighting technologies designed for the developing world.
• Daoud Kuttab, the pioneering Palestinian journalist and new media expert, will share his thoughts on the impact of new media in the Middle East.
• Kelly Joe Phelps, the mesmerizing blues guitarist, will perform.
• Dan Pink, the noted journalist will share his thoughts on the rise of the creative economy.
• Davy Rothbart, the founder of Found magazine, will share some his hilarious findings.
• Enric Sala, the rising star of marine ecology, will share his work documenting the human impact on the oceans.

A friend of mine, Paul Whitaker from Nokia is currently flying a 1940 Piper cub from Paris Texas to San Francisco and he’s making a tremendous use of social media to document his adventure. His plane can only travel about 150 miles at a time at 70 miles an hour, which means he has to make 24 hops, going from small local airfield to local airfield. He has a blog obviously at adventurecub.com, and he also has a flickr map mashup documenting his route, all the photos being taken on his N95, automatically geotagged, and uploaded to Flickr via Shozu, an amazing little media sharing tool.

Not to be too much of a Nokia fan boy it is pretty damn cool to be able to take pictures from the plane as your flying and upload them to flickr It’s almost the equivilent of visual tweeting, I wonder when twitter will allow picture uploads like this, or even photos that are tagged with certain information. I hope I can do the same thing when I’m in Vietnam this Chrismas, although i’m not sure what the cell phone coverage will be there.

Link to the video of David interviewing Ze (I took the embed out because it kept playing automatically, very annoying)

David Armano did a hell of a job at the Forrester Consumer forum, running round with a laptop streaming the whole conference to the Critical Mass media mashup at alwaysinbeta.criticalmass.com, including their twitter feed, chatroom, and ustream video feed.

One of the high points of the conference for me was hanging out and chatting with Ze Frank and David did an impromptu video with him via Ustream. Ze is apparently not thrilled with most of the interviews he does, and I can imagine he gets asked the same crap over and over again. Armano did a good job of just having a conversation with him and it’s interesting stuff. I find that Ze has an outsiders perspective and helps deflate mental models that business people have quickly built to navigate the tumultuous changes in the business environment. Some might call Ze’s approach common sense, but you know what they say about common sense, it’s not too common.

I have mixed emotions about my recent authority ranking on technorati, i’ve recently dropped from 427 to 402 and that sucks. It sucks because my motivation to blog ebbs and flows a lot and I actually find that measures of popularity like technorati, although not really meaningful (really), they do help motivate me, and believe me if you want to blog for 4 or 5 years on a regular basis motivation is key. In the last week or so i’ve worked particularly hard on creating some meaningful posts and have got some great comments and links which also contribute to my motivation, but that has coincided with this drop in rank on technorati. I don’t want to care, I really don’t, but something inside of me does. So again, technorati, a service that I have really rallied for is actually succeeding in contributing to demotivation. This strikes me in many ways the hight of irony and possibly at the core of technorati’s continuing trials and missteps.

IMHO any service like technorati that actually helps motivate bloggers and make them feel like they are contributing to a greater good (assuming they actually are of course, sploggers and theiving auto bloggers should be damned to hell), would be wildly successful.

Businesses in general should take note of this, make your customers feel great about what they do, make them feel like they are part of a greater good and you will also be wildly successful, just like companies like Flickr, Patagonia, Etsy, Yelp, youtube, Ebay etc.

I guess at some point Technorati stopped looking at bloggers as their customers and that’s when it went pair shaped.

As for anyone that reads my humble blog, you really are my main motivation, and I don’t say it often enough, thanks for reading, commenting and linking

Dove’s campaign for real beauty is getting more subversive, more shocking, and more touching with it’s recent edition of this video “Onslaught“. This ad goes much further IMHO than their previous commercial “evolution” which showed how photoshop can transform an average looking girl into, as the huffington post calls it a “glamazon”. Onslaught provides a montage of the impossibly beautiful and sexy, clips of the overused superlatives in womens advertising, coupled with the graphic extreme measures that some will take to get there from surgery to bulimia.

What Dove succeeds at here is creating something sharable, meaningful, and conversational, it’s something worth talking about. Sure they are trying to sell soap, but they are also trying to bring some attention to the undesirable effect of the objectification of people and more specifically in this case women. I don’t unnecessarily think Dove or Unilever is altruistic, but it’s often just good business to stand apart from the competition, especially for something that a large portion of the thinking population can actually buy into, that’s what Patagonia did.

Some say Dove is having a polarizing effect on the industry being called everything from pretentious, manipulative, self-serving, and hypocritical. Amy Jussel at the Shaping Youth blog has a pretty comprehensive wrap up that’s worth a look. My experience in the blogosphere so far has been pretty positive although some of the comments on those blog posts are more vitriolic. Joseph Jaffe has a good post on it here.

So this is some early experimental thinking here so feel free to poke holes, call bullshit, or add your own take in the comments.

I’m using the term co-creative marketing here as I think it’s a better more holistic term than “viral”. I still think viral is a totally valid tactic, but I don’t think it’s a strategy. Viral in most cases is not much better than a 30 second spot except it’s distribution is cheaper, I guess that’s why marketers and advertisers are so generally comfortable with the concept.

For me the concept of co-creative marketing is something that should, at it’s best, be built into the DNA of your products and services. Something that builds tremendous value for you over time, something that ends up building “social equity“.

My working definition of social equity for the moment is: “social equity is built by aggregating, connecting, reflecting and amplifying the all the small user contributions over time so the whole is worth much more than the sum of its parts.” Sort of like network effects, the more people using it and participating the more valuable your product or service.

Anyway, I was thinking about what the necessary components were for co-creative marketing and came up with Shareable, Mashable, and Hackable which i’ll elaborate on a bit here. I think I have a much better idea of what makes something sharable and some nascent ideas on mashable and hackable.

Shareable

Shareable may seem self explanatory, but sometimes it takes effort to create elements of your product or service that are shareable. Easy to share, right size, right format, WORTH SHARING. YouTube is probably the poster child of “shareble” content with their embedable video player, that is what made their business.

Once you have content or items worth sharing it’s important to measure and track how people are using and sharing it. Measurement can help you track where things start, who are the influencers, and what the response is.

Of course the big rhino in the room is why would someone want to share your stuff with other people. Most companies seem to think putting an “email to a friend” link on their mundane web site is enough to get people frothing at the mouth to tell their friends. Unfortunately that is not enough, the act of sharing something requires not only effort but generally involves someone putting their reputation on the line. If someone is sharing something of yours be it a video, image, coupon etc. they are endorsing you and you had better make them look good.

You might even try and cultivate sharers and influencers, some people like to be firestarters, they like to be the first to know, and they like to be the first to tell their friends about it. Take a look at Jeremiah’s concept of early adopters/influencers or David Armano’s Influence Rippples Diagram for more on this.

One thing I wonder about this is how much more shareble are real world products, or at least information about real world products will become as the mobile evernet becomes more pervasive? Think how text message short codes could be used on real world products, or on environmental media.

Mashable

Mashable means can someone build something new and interesting information you provide? Is there any base of machine readable structured data that you can give access to your customers, programmers, kids with too much time on their hands? RSS, XML, or even proper API’s. Think google maps, craigs list, RSS feeds, Geocoded information etc.

Think about what information is created just through the use of your product or service, and how can that make your product more attractive. A brilliant example of this comes from Facebook, when you see the underlying data of how your friends are using certain applications or games, you can see how much more attractive these products become. Take the Texas Holdem application for instance which has presence information, leader-board information etc.

Hackable

Hacking of course has some pretty scary connotations, but hackability is essentially the secret behind a lot of the buzz created by products like the Roomba, Lego Mind Storms, and maybe even Harley Davidsons and Mini Coopers. How can customers make your product their own which can be as simple as customization, and how can they make it do things that you didn’t even intend

So how can you make it hackable? distribute source code, create api’s, create easter eggs, create competitions, put frameworks in place. Even some of these consumer generated commercials where a company might provide different video assets and soundtracks to enable customers to create their own commercials is hackability in a way. putting a framework in place for people to be creative.

These are just some rough ideas of what can contribute to the co-creative marketing of a product. I have one more aspect which I have not quite figured out where it fits and how to describe it, but it’s at the heart of what makes products and services co-creative. It’s where customers contribute to the primary value of a product or service, think ebay, threadless, yelp, flickr, Etsy, ThisNext, Delicious. They all have aspects that are shareable, mashable, and hackable, but the primary value they create is co-creative. So what is that? Contributable? Crowdsourced?

A writer promoting his book “the internet, now in handy book form” created a wonderful parody of Facebook, a potentially brilliant example of viral marketing seems to be dead on target. Although it is possible that people that find this the funniest are unlikely to be interested in a book that on the surface might be targeted to the internet newb. But then are they the ones that are going to spread it further? Boy, viral targeting is a conundrum.

Damn, you’ve got to be a full time student I could have used that to cover my student loans.