ExperienceCurve by Karl Long

I read a great article in the SF Bay Guardian written by Annalee Newitz who blogs at techsploitation.com (awesome name). Anyway, the article is called And the real anonymous trolls online are . . . . In this article she skewers the very un-anonymous troll Andrew Keen, who’s been crying about how the internets is undermining his word view of authority and modernity (maybe he should check out Bioshock). Anyway, this is a rather round about way to talk about a tool called wikiscanner which basically looks up the ip address of any anonymous edits on wikipedia and then looks up what organization owns that ip address. The result, lots of egg on government and corporation faces. With Pepsi editing some of the negative health effects of diet pepsi, to exxon adjusting the size of past oil spills, or wal-mart changing facts about their wages. Some of these edits actually reveal some stewardship of course like Pixar editing the Shrek 4 entry to reflect that it was a Dreamworks Animation and not Pixar.

All of these gems were taken from the Wired reddit list of most salacious wikipedia anonymous edits

If you’re a company that doesn’t have a wikipedia policy get one now.

Relate see my article on uncommon uses for the wiki

Great little viral ad created by a company called SimpleSpark, which is an online directory of “web applications”. The video itself is simple, 5000 logos of web applications that they track in their directory, which demonstrates the problem that they are solving immediately. Not only do they track these applications in a directory they also have reviews of the apps and suggestions for other similar apps as well. Not only do they track web applications, but also mobile web apps, iphone web apps, and wii web apps.

Tip of the hat to LaughingSquid

Hugh over at gapingvoid raises the interesting point that even though the market for companies to create and deliver one way “messages” is dissapearing, demand for PR, marketing, and advertising professionals is growing. The question is now that we don’t control the “message” what are we doing?

To quote Hugh:

I’m going to add number 4:

4. Value: Social Equity, the value you build over time from the creation of and participation with social gestures and social objects.

I’m absolutely convinced that one of the biggest differences between traditional marketing, and new conversational, people driven marketing is you actually build value over time. I think blogs are one of the best examples, every time you post to a blog it’s like making a small deposit in a bank account, each one build on the rest, and ends up returning interest that compounds. The value of a blog over time becomes more than the sum of the individual posts, as it and the author becomes interconnected through other blogs and sites.

Traditional marketing and advertising used to try and build brand equity, in the new conversational marketplace companies that are participating are building social equity (i’m sure that means something else somewhere but it seems appropriate).

What else could you call the value you build over time by participating in the O’Sphere?

Bryan Person just recently started an interesting meme called the “social media top ten” on his blog, basically the top ten stories around social media this week. In addition to posting the list himself he also proposed other people create their own “social media top ten”, post it on their blogs and tag it with “SMT10″ for technorati. So I thought I would contribute to this and start my own “social media top ten”, I’m also going to using the tag on delicious which i’ll bookmark the stories I think are relevant on there as well.

So here’s my Social Media Top Ten for last week:

• Post: Rethinking Crossing The Chasm on Read/Write Web - Social media changing the way companies can cross the chasm between early adopters and the mass market
• News: Pligg is for sale, the open source version of the digg platform is for sale, including the domain, community and everything. With over 60,000 downloads from Sourceforge it’s got quite an install base.
• News: Tecnorati lays off 8, Sifry, the CEO resigns.
• Tool: With the launch of Spock the “person search engine”, a new place emerged to aggregate information about your name. Could this become the automatic social network?
• Post: Peter Kim’s advice to marketers on social networks
• Bubble: Facebook Application sells for $3 Million
• Reports of blogging’s death are greatly exaggerated: BL Ochman, Hugh at Gaping Void and Hugh again
• wikipatents great example of co-creation, and the patent for the automatic bird trap and cat feeder is an example of of crazy assed patents

I’ve got 6 more pownce invites so drop me a line if you want one. I currently use Twitter and Pownce so feel free to add me on either. On a side note i’m really looking forward to this twitter wordpress plugin, the feature list looks amazing.

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.

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

Now Toddands Power 150 is going to not only be hosted at Ad Age, but they will be taking over management and growth of it using Todd’s “multi metric” methodology. This is pretty amazing news for anyone on the top 150 (i’m hanging on at 126 somewhere), as Ad Age will i’m sure be promoting it’s new “acquisition”.

“Top X lists” and lists of “top blogs” have become a kind of currency in the marketing blogospere in the last year or so from the viral gardens top 25 to Toddands “power 150″ to Peter Kim’s top 13 marketer blogs. In some ways “top X blogs” was like the web site awards that proliferated in the late 90’s, hey you’ve one an award in the form of this gif, stick it in your side bar etc. but taking my cynical hat off for a second i think these “top x blog” lists filled an important gap in the blogosphere in the form of metrics for very specific niche blogs (nlogs? bliches?).

IMHO Ad Age taking over the Power 150 represents a pretty amazing blogosphere to mainstream media cross over. In many ways Todd was filling a gap by rating these sites and providing a scoreboard for a particular niche, in this case marketing, and now Ad Age is interested in rating blogs just decided to acquire Todd’s methodology and take it over.

My question is why hasn’t technorati or another smart programmer developed a way to put together these lists or scoreboards using multiple metrics in particular niches? Great i’m in the technorati top 10K, so fucking what, it just means I’m less popular than BoingBoing, and I didn’t need a web site to tell me that.

Well i’m heading out for a couple of days and will be offline, i’m going to Laguna Seca in Monterey to watch the Moto GP (motorcycle racing). Anyway I had to post this t-shirt before I left - Viral Marketing Doesn’t Work - Tell Everyone You know - brilliant and ironic, not sure if it’s funny to people who are not marketing geeks. What would be even funnier is if this got dugg and ended up on the front page of digg (fingers crossed

Anyway, have a great weekend, I may post some stuff from my phone if I find some good T’s at the racing. Somehow I think racetracks are a rich source of ironic shirts, although I would probably do better in that regard at Nascar.

BTW I found the viral marketing t-shirt via Jeremiah’s twitter feed

Apparently you can get the shirt here but the site is down right now
trigger leads

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.