ExperienceCurve by Karl Long

What makes me laugh so much about this brilliant parody and almost homage to viral marketing is how it’s almost plausible. Remember LonleyGirl15

Funny as this is, it’s almost analogous to how lost some companies are in approaching social media. I love it when Ben Stiller is whispering to his cousin “let me in, what is it makes you tick”. Brilliant.

This is a wonderful video presentation on YouTube that focuses the anthropology, the behavior, and the culture that YouTube is enabling. This is a wonderful video from an educational standpoint and I plan to use it in the upcoming course on social media I will be teaching in the fall at the Academy of Arts University in San Francisco.

So Jeremiah Owyang, an analyst at Forrester and author of the Web Strategist blog just said this on twitter:

And then this happened:

Damn, there goes inbox zero

When twitter is actually working i’m here

Nokia has put together a quite ambitious stop motion video involving a cast of thousands, which included a very cool stop motion block breaker game using people as the gaming pieces. I’ve seen plenty of stop motion games reenacted, like the famous space invaders in the theater but I think this is the actual game you can play using stop motion people as the characters. The Block Breaker game shows up in the middle of the video and you can navigate directly to it by clicking on the middle section of the time line.

I think it would be really fun if they did another version that enabled people to swap in pictures of themselves, possibly friends, and maybe had a bit more of a high score component to it.

All of your favorite internet stars including Chocolate Rain guy (Tay Zonday), Star Wars Kid, Laughing baby, Sneezing Panda, Tron guy, Numa Numa, and Chris Cocker (Leave Britney Alone), and possibly LonelyGirl15 in the background.

Via Fimoculous

Asda loans one of the biggest personal loan lenders is a part of the walmart family

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

It reminds me of what Jonnie Moore was saying on his blog recently about social objects:

And Guy Kawasaki agrees

Just got this message purportedly from Mark Zuckerberg via my “fun wall” on facebook asking me to forward it on to my friends to make sure I’m still an “active member”, with the idea that they will start “deleting” inactive members. Sure this is totally false, but it just shows how a social tool like Facebook is potentially open to malicious social engineering. It even sets people up for scamming some money later with the idea of getting donations later if facebook is still “overpopulated”.

UPDATE: It’s already been parodied

According to a new NPD Report video games are becoming and increasingly mainstream activity with a reported 63% of Americans playing video games, and 30% of them playing them more than last year. It’s rather amusing in many ways that “video games” essentially got hijacked by teenaged boys (both figuratively and literally) for the last decade (me being one of them). But with innovations in gameplay like the Wii, social games like Guitar Hero, and Rock Band video games are becoming again, just games, encouraging us to play, and play together.

A few people have been making suggestions for what the trends for 2008 are going to be and I may be biased but I think there is going to be continued innovation around what games can actually be. This includes video games, mobile games, “big games”, and Alternate Reality games. David Armano has stated he thinks 2008 is going to be the year of mobile media and I agree, and I think that includes games and how we consume and interact with social media (which of course I think are kind of like games).

Also check out Greg Verdino’s trends of 2007,

Tay Zonday of the original Chocolate Rain has done such a brilliant job of selling out here with Cherry Dr Pepper with his new song “cherry chocolate rain”.

This is in many ways the new celebrity endorsement ad, and quite a good strategy, but requires companies or agencies to keep their fingers on the pulse of the internet zeitgeist. Probably a much more reliable approach than companies trying to make their own “viral” videos.

hat tip to Steve at Adrants