I think Micah’s post on the Lie About Community hits the mark pretty well. “Community”, like Social and Participation and Conversation has been the buzzword for a while now. Everyone wants one. Clients want the “network effects” and the “just add water” efficiency of having a group of interested individuals focused on their product/service/brand. Every company would love to have a community. Every Brand and Product or Service would love to have dedicated, passionate fans who check in all the time. Agencies would love to sell their clients on this day-in-and-out. Every agency out there would love to sell a client on building a community around there .

Just showing up doesnt make it a community. If that was the case, then Grand Central Station in NYC would have a new community every 5 minutes. Just because people go somewhere doesnt mean they are engaged, that they care, or that they are something more than a collection of individuals checking something out. Just because we all like airbags in cars doesnt mean there will be a Ning site tomorrow dedicated to our love and fandom of all-things Airbag.

Then again, survivors of car accidents thanks to Airbags could be a community.

Community is something that grows over time and connections (shallow and deep) are made, broken, strained and strengthened. A forum isn’t a community. A chat room isn’t a community. A blog isn’t a community. A wiki isn’t a community. But a community can be found on all four (and more platforms). It has to start with something that people care about or have an interest in. Then comes the participation. Then comes the quality of interaction. Then comes the exchange of the member’s attention for value (sense of belonging, information, catharsis, etc.). Then comes the investment of time/effort/attention/love.

Its kinda like porn – we know Community when we see it:

Where we see individuals self-organizing around a common goal/topic/crisis/effort/idea/joke
Where we see a company facilitating and acting as a host – encouraging and participating in the community’s interactions, acting as a guide (and sometimes a hall monitor) without being a shill, a censor or drill instructor
When the members of the community take ownership and a stake in its ongoing existence by policing their own, sharing and helping, acting like members instead of guests

More importantly, like a startup, or neighborhood, within a community a culture develops. Shared expectations of behavior and action are mutually agreed on and evolve over time.

childrenwithdiabetes.com is an amazing community that developed from one dad’s desire to share and interact with other families whose children were diagnosed with Type 1 Diabetes (Jeff’s story is awesome and I am going to be begging him for an interview in the coming weeks). The community managers were there to keep things moving, to keep an eye on things without being heavy-handed. The community – kids and parents – share and interact and help each other online and off. They had a common interest (kids with diabetes), a way of connecting (the website and meetups) a culture that evolved and grew as the community did. They built trust and love between the site and the members and between the members themselves to the point where, when the management of the site let the community know that they were going to be bought by J&J the community gave them the benefit of the doubt because “we trust Jeff”.

You can’t buy that – you can only earn it.

After all that rambling, whats driving me nuts is this idea that community managers can be outsourced or provided by the SaaS platform provider. Thats plain nuts. Its like “ghostbloggers” who blog for someone else. How can a company claim to be more authentic and trying to enter the conversation when they hire outsiders to communicate? Authenticity by proxy? Community managers, in my mind, need to function as a both hosts and facilitators – helping the newbies, participating, adding to the conversation, and listening to the community – they are the lighting rods for trust between members and the management. Agencies/Consultants/Community Gurus should be “teaching the skill of fishing” instead of being fishmongers. Otherwise, communiy managers are just moderators/hall monitors/crossing guards – involved but not really committed.

A company can only show it’s committment to community with actions: honest dialog, engaging the members, listening, asking permission, being authentic not talking about it,paying it forward.

How much does one of those opportunities cost? It can’t be cheap to put up a billboard in an airport, right? That same amount would fund a social media project for an entire year, and you’d have clickable metrics for the effort. Wouldn’t that be a better return?

Did Chris remember the name of the company sponsoring the phone/laptop charging station (Samsung)? The Advertising worked (and got the fringe benefit of promotion on Chris’ blog)

Did Chris remember those Vending Machines in the airport (Apple and Best Buy)?? The Advertising worked (” fringe benefit” comment again).

Did Chris remember the 2 billboards before the Hudson News stand? How about the 2 page spread in the middle of this month’s WIRED? The 12 commercials that ran between when you sat down at Fox Sports Bar and when you got up?

Little Guy In The Subway With A Bag of $

The two examples he used (Samsung charging stations and the Apple or Best Buy vending machines) worked because they either provided immediate value (needing to juice up, a HUGE problem in most airports, or chargers, iPods, etc.) or potential future value. They fit within his/yours/my context. If my mom was travelling at the same time, she wouldnt notice who sponsored the power, because she doesnt travel with devices that need power. She might notice the Apple vending machines because they are novel/unique to her, but 5 years from now she will ignore them because they will be commonplace.

Billboards are a “shotgun” approach (with a ton of metrics behind it). The hope is, the right person happens to walk by who happens to have that product or service as part of their context (along with Direct Marketing phone, email, URL to let them find out more AND to let the marketer see effectiveness) or the creative in the ad connects with the user (for a brand campaign – the iconic APPLE ads are a great example of this). In the case of Brand ads, the marketer is paying for impressions (and they pay through the nose – those boards aren’t cheap). In the case of ads with some kind of direct component, the ROI can be (to a certain extent) measured. There are impressions and clickthrough rates to measure against. Is it personal? Nope.

Here is the thing: this stuff, these traditional techniques (print, radio, tv, out-of-home, ad banners, PR, etc.) aren’t going away. Sure, more of the budget is going to digital, but not all of it. There are more of them (less digitally savvy or complete luddites) than there are of us (people reading this, living this, sharing this thing of ours). Marketers still think of us in terms of CONSUMERS and demographics. The reason the old school isn’t going away, the reason we don’t have the advertising apocalypse is because of one thing – IT STILL WORKS.

While we keep saying Social Media is no longer an experiment, we need to keep the marketer’s context in mind. The CMO wants to be innovative, and the brand manager wants to change the world, but both have numbers (leads, impressions, brand value, etc.) that they have to meet to be successful, to grow their brand, get their bonus or in some cases keep their job (the avg lifespan of a CMO is currently something like 22 months). No one ever got fired for doing yet another Direct Mail campaign (where a 1% response rate is considered successful), billboard or tv/radio spot – they are part of the marketing mix. Even ad banners get clickthroughs and they are the “ritz crackers” (low value, not tasty or very effective) of digital advertising.

Small, growing and new brands can go all-in on Digital and Social because they need an edge, and the edge is reach and cost and hopefully shortcut the need for brand recognition and jump right to a relationship. P&G knows it needs Social and is working towards it for the long term (the same thing they did with radio and TV). Ford and GM know they need it, but have to work harder to connect emotionally and with passion (two things that are kinda requirements). If all you do is SELL SELL SELL, its kinda hard to “start a conversation” – you have to invest a lot (time, money, humility) to get respect and to get people to listen. That investment is happening now.

As the Social Media side of Digital grows and matures (and we get more news like the Dell metrics) it can make the case to take a bigger piece of the marketing pie. Digital is no longer sitting at the kids table when it comes to the Agency-Client relationship. Digital is getting more and more budget because it is effective and less expensive and has greater, time-agnostic reach. Sure, we might start shooting commercials for Hulu (or whatever replaces it) and we may see more immersive and experiential and integrated efforts in the future, but the Old School isn’t going away. An ad agency I interviewed a few months ago WILL NOT HIRE an account, strategist or creative without digital in the portfolio or CV. Its becoming that important.

But Social can be the “red thread” that ties the traditional and the digital together, make them more connected, connecting, relevant and responsive. Social (listening, outreach, participatory) can start changing the marketing mindset from campaign to commitment. But that is going to take time.

In 10 years we will have Marketers (CMOs and Brand Managers) who have grown up with Digital in their toolbox from the beginning. Thats when things will start getting weird (in a good way).

:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

Like it? Hate it? Leave a comment below

You need to be a neighbor, not Vince from ShamWOW (who I think is AWESOME, but not a good example of starting/having/maintaining/sharing a conversation). If all you do is pitch AT them all day, they will tune you out. If you spend at least half of your time celebrating them, encouraging them, recognizing them, sharing with the rest of the community what they are doing/have learned/successes/challenges, then they might listen to the other 50% of your “stuff”.

Link Love is described in Wikipedia as “the effect that web pages rank better when they have more and higher quality links pointing at them.” It is partly about attribution (making sure you acknowledge where a discussion or quote came from), but it is also about sharing these connections that you value with your users – and hopefully they will check out those links. This is a powerful gesture, because in the digital space, links are a currency. They have intrinsic value, links are an outward, public display of paying attention. Says Doc, “In simpler terms, humans are distinguished no only by their ability to talk, but also by their ability to point.”

Some real examples of Link Love:

• Blogrolls are Link Love: they share with the readers of any given blog the other “voices we like”.
• Trackbacks are Link Love: they create a connection between my blog post and another blogger’s post – a discrete, ping-based connection that says to the user and the blogosphere “hey, these things are related”.
• Twitter posts are Link Love – I think enough of what someone is doing to share it with my circle of followers/friends
• Comments (although sometimes NOT counted by Google thanks to comment spam) are Link Love – I think enough of the ideas in this post to not only leave a note, but also where I can be found later for thanks/feedback/comments/a beating.

How do we connect in with this link economy? Where does Reciprocity fit in?

We need to link to the voices and ideas outside our “four walls”. If our blogroll only contains the other blogs our company has created and not the blogs of the users then we aren’t using that currency properly. If we only comment on other corporate blogs, then we aren’t connecting with our community. If we have a twitter feed with thousands of followers, but only following a few users, then we are missing out on an opportunity to participate. As publishers/pundits/journalists/program managers and “experts” we need to send the link love out there first (real, authentic), without expectations that it will be returned until we have earned it – and earning it is completely in the mind of the user. You either add value or you don’t. You are sponge-worthy or you are not (to use a Seinfeld reference). Reciprocity in this context is less about obligation (“oh hell, he linked to me, so now I need to link to him”), and more about attention and intent (“X is paying attention to my ideas”, or better yet “wow, those guys from Company Y spend a lot of time talking about what the members of their community are doing”). Its about adding enough value that others think you are worthy of their currency (links, attention, comments – whatever your measure of success is).

One of the clearest, fastest ways of seeing the 50/50 Rule in action is on Twitter with users like Richard @ Dell and Zappos. Richard@DELL is one of the leaders in corporations working with social software like twitter and making business personal. He spends as much of his time sending users to other voices and links as he does “Dell Business” with his twitter feed. Zappos uses his tweet time to talk about the people he is meeting with and interacting than he does his own site (along with DMs to users who ask questions about Zappos.

Liz Strauss has this to say in her killer blog post about the 25 Twitter Traits/ Twitter Folks she admires:

Certain value and actions make people who care about having relationships and conversation before transactions easy to spot…
5. talk mostly about the accomplishments of others….
12. shout out good news, help in emergencies, and celebrate with everyone.
16. offer advice when people ask. Help whenever they can.

If you want people to talk to you and about you, then link to them for all the right reasons. Spend the time and the social capital to celebrate what they are doing. Show where you see the value in them. If you want them to link to you, give them lots of opportunities to find something valuable in what you are doing. A shout-out is a personal gesture regardless if it comes from the DJ booth, the radio or a blog post.

Thing to do:

1. If you are building a community anywhere (twitter, facebook, ning, wordpress, Meetup, etc.) spend the time to look at how much you are talking about “Me Me Me Me Me” and course correct NOW.
2. If you have nothing to to link to (don’t really have a relationship with the users beyond their consuming your “stuff”) then start that conversation NOW.
3. Use the features of the community to connect with users: ask them if they have blogs and add ‘em to your blogroll (or have a special blogroll for your community members), send Link Love to them through microblogging platforms like Twitter, use the forums as a commons for discussion and to point out the achievements of the users
4. Celebrate your users and set an incredible example that shows the rest of the community just how much you appreciate them – small, simple gestures can have a real impact.
5. Reciprocity is like love – it isn’t an obligation, but something freely given. Hope but don’t demand, ask, but not too often.
6. Be “linky”, use the currency of the web to show your users what/who you think is valuable.
7. Be real. Don’t engage in linkbait, users notice and your credibility will suffer as a result
8. Send half of your time talking about the users, the community, the people outside your org, company, startup (the 50/50 rule)

Think this is a great post and should be required reading for companies that want to “use” social media.

It may seem like splitting hairs, but in my mind there’s a difference between ghost writing the typical items mentioned above and ghost writing blog posts, Twitter “tweets,” and blog comments. That’s because there is a different expectation in place when it comes to social media engagement.

If we really believe in this stuff, not just paying lip service to cluetrain and treat “the conversation” like the newest jug of snake oil, then ghost blogging has to be seen as inauthentic, not real, and BAD IDEA.

Strategists, “gurus” and agencies need to stop treating their clients like junkies and acting as crack dealers. They need to stop “blogging for”, “communicating for” and “using social media” for their clients and work with the clients to develop a real sustainable culture within the communications (marketing and PR and events) teams of DOING THIS THEMSELVES. Are you really joining the users in a conversation if you are doing it by proxy (ghost blogger)? Acting as a filter between the user and the client is inherently INAUTHENTIC, FALSE AND WRONG.

The main reason I got involved with digital media in the early days was because it was different, special, unique. The same goes with Social Media. How is blogging different from a press release if it isnt real?

Are you really joining the conversation if you are having someone do it for you?

Strategy at its core is about education. Guru by definition is a teacher or guide. These roles arent meant to be cutouts between the user and the org. We “experts” need to help the clients tell their stories and connect DIRECTLY with the users. I would rather see the intern in the client’s Comm department blogging than have some wonk in the agency write it for them.

In Social Media, WHO says it is as important as WHAT is said. Otherwise this will end up like press releases and advertising… and users will move on.

John and Shel Holtz recently released their new book Tactical Transparency: How Leaders Can Leverage Social Media to Maximize Value and Build their Brand (where yours truly is quoted). Check it out.

>>> Editors Note: I am an idiot and got my “Shel”s mixed up, originally posting John’s co-author as Shel Israel, and not Shel Holtz, who IS the co-author of Tactical Transparency. My sincerest apologies to John and Shel, and thanks to Shel Israel who pointed out my error. I have corrected it above.

For a long time the human race thought the sun revolved around the world. Then we figured it out.

I think brands and users are in a similar dynamic. Users don’t revolve around brands (even if they LOVE them, like Apple, the Corvette, & Manchester United), Brands revolve around users. Users bring brands into their own lives. Users add significance and context to Brands, not the other way around.

Canon helps me take pictures of important moments in my life. Those moments are going to happen with or without Canon.

Brands take up space in our lives when we let them in. Brand stewards create platforms for us to connect with, keep the brand relevant to their target markets, basically create opportunities for us to connect with brands.

For example, Social Media experts are everywhere. When they’re everywhere, they’re nowhere. In other words, they don’t matter.

So if you want to tout your expertise then you better possess a passion for making other people’s lives better, not yours. And you better do what you love in a way that sets you apart from the experts.

I have been pitched by “Social Media Experts” that don’t blog, that dont twitter, that dont videoblog, that don’t stay on top of the more social trends on the web (my least favorite excuse is the one about the shoemakers children).

When I work with clients on these types of projects my main goal is to get them to become the experts. They need to believe this is something different. They need to commit. They need to do the work, make the effort, reach out to the users in real authentic ways. If we are trying to be more real and more authentic, why would we let an agency do it for us?

The Social Media Expert should be a catalyst, an evangelist (sorry @DAHOWLETT !), someone who is looking at the landscape, helping their clients understand what this is about, work together to build the program and advising them over time to tune and tweak and enhance their program and how they communicate. I think there may be something inauthentic about hiring an agency to communicate in a real voice to your users/customers/fans. Part of this thing of ours is about becoming more transparent, removing the “press release barrier”, dropping the the corp speak and taking off some of the armor that companies build to “protect” themselves from their users.

Whats really important?

How does this all relate to Social Interactions on the Web? Any decent Social Media effort will have some kind of Outreach program:

1. Identifying bloggers, podcasters, videobloggers, forums, communities, social spaces that have something in common with the Social Media Effort
2. Joining the spaces and conversations in a forward, transparent manner
3. Add value to the discussions and attention without expectation or demand of reciprocity (pay it forward slick ad guy)
4. Make good stuff, not marketing taglines or “socialized” press releases
5. Keep the effort going – this is more about bringing big corporations down to eye level with the user than “eyeballs” or “share” or “Audience”

So now a Social Media Effort is doing outreach the right way, is adding something to the conversation, is getting people talking. Users start talking. 2-way dialog meets the 2-way web:

Users start leaving comments on the Social Media Effort’s YouTube videos
Users start threads in a forum dedicated to some topic or subject that the Social Media Effort is engaged in
Users start twittering about it (thanks Pistachio!)
Users start blogging about it
Users start mentioning it in their podcasts, videoblogs, screencasts
Users start participating, giving you their clicks, their eyeballs, their intention, and their voices

In the “little kid” example, it starts in direct personal interactions and continues in the dreaded process of writing thank you notes for birthday and Christmas presents. In this Social Media world of ours, when a user leaves a comment on your blog do you look to see where they are coming from? Do you respond to their comment? Do you check out their blog? Do you look and see what they are writing, what they are into? Do you leave a comment on their blog? Do you add them to your blogroll? When they mention you in a forum like Videoblogging do you respond on-list or leave them a note or tweet? Do you have the processes and procedures in place to listen AND respond?

Not all users will have something to say that is profound or game changing or even nice. Sometimes it will be mean, or bitchy, or completely negative. Sometimes it will be missing the point entirely. Sometimes it will be a simple, anonymous “thanks guys” – and thats it. Its on their terms.

The point is, you are becoming a neighbor, joining a community, being part of something that is smaller and bigger than yourself. Scoble and Godin can’t answer every comment and no one expects a Social Media Effort to mean “direct, personal, immediate, one-to-one communication”. But they do expect that you are listening and they expect you to show it. Demonstrative examples of “hey, we aren’t asleep at the switch or using this Social Media stuff to scam you”.

Are YOU actively participating in the architectures of participation you are spending so much time and money and effort on? Are you showing the community you are trying to engage that you are both interesting AND interested? Social Media Efforts ache over how many ways they can engage the user and get them to hit the SUBMIT button, register, leave a comment or write a wiki entry. If you are spending all this time creating “feedback loops”: platforms, code and process to get users to interact and participate and join in, are you closing the loop?

Some Social Media Efforts spend a fortune (things like Radian6, BuzzMetrics, employees, PR/Ad/Social Media agency personnel) on listening to the places and spaces where users are talking about them. Some more grassroots or startup Social Media Efforts utilize Technorati/Google Alerts/Summize/TweetScan/Etc. and brute-force (human capital) to see where they are being mentioned.

Do:

• Have a blogroll – it is an outward, persistent sign of the sites, people and voices you believe in.
• Linklove – be “linky” – link to the users, call it out when they add something to the conversation, send the attention of the conversation at your door to their door
• Celebrate the things happening OUTSIDE your four walls – if your entire conversation is “me, me, me” the conversation will become a monologue. Call out the wins and ideas of the community, show you are participating by checking out their flickr feed, their blog, their tweets, their Second Life island. Spend a % (make it a hard rule if you have to – “one story every day or week or hour will be dedicated to THEM”) of your time and blog space and twitter feed and flickr experience on the community
• Participate – in the comments, forum, NING ring on your platforms AND the platforms where your users live. Don’t be radio-silent. Show them someone is there and her/his name is Susan or Fred not ADMIN or MODERATOR. Humans don’t have conversations with MODERATORS. In the same way that you call out what users are doing outside your four walls also participate on the user’s sites/platforms. Leave a comment on their blog or Flickr feed. Reply to their tweets. Show you are listening AND visiting
• Don’t trust one person to be the “community manager” and be responsible for all the commenting and listening and responding – it is everyone’s job. Find ways to get individuals inside the company or org interested in participating. Give them small things to do, get their opinion on what they can do/interested in/would be willing to try. Not everyone wants to be on camera or a blogger – and they all have day-jobs. Make it as frictionless and as fun as possible. I would rather interact with someone inside than some hired blogger or agency wonk

When a user paid you a compliment with their attention, did you remember to write a thank you note?

Emotionally, I don’t understand why so many people get so upset at being marketed to, or at gleefully acknowledging the good that comes from crafting a social world that is dominated by people willingly exchanging skills, services, and goods. These types could be called Generation Dobler, after the famous quote from the sad sensitive man-child character, Lloyd Dobler, played by John Cusack in the 1989 film Say Anything.

Dobler certified his soulfulness by announcing that “I don’t want to sell anything, buy anything, or process anything as a career. I don’t want to sell anything bought or processed, or buy anything sold or processed, or process anything sold, bought, or processed, or repair anything sold, bought, or processed.” (my bold)

I need to get crackin on a “Generation Dobler” group on Facebook

http://www.boingboing.net/2007/07/12/burning_man_and_gene.html

Something that’s missing in Google’s repertoire of information searching tools. It’s something between Technorati, Google News, and Google itself. Think of it as the old-girlfriend query tool. Let’s say I used to date a woman named Tammy. From time to time I wonder what’s up with her. So I do a search, and find the same old links. I want to find all the new stuff. I don’t just want to search blogs, so it’s not what Technorati does. I don’t just care if she makes the news, so it isn’t what Google News does. For extra credit, I’d like it to come in RSS format so I can teach my aggregator to do this for me automatically.

BTW, once we get this feature, I predict the same kind of backlash that came when Facebook added rich RSS support. All of a sudden lurkers will have a new advantage, and the lurkees might not be happy about it.

I agree that it does touch the creepymeter for lurkers (although some folks who live in digital and celebrate it might not mind at all). But Dave hits the nail on the head with both the usage and the fact that it is missing from the market.

What I want is the unholy mashup of google/googlenews/technorati for corporations, governments (local, national, international), non-profits, etc.

I want an RSS feed for  JetBlue (a former client, and my all-time favorite airline). And I want to see all of the news stories (thanks googlenews), blog postings (technorati/icerocket/whoever is next) and new content found by the googlebots about JetBlue. It becomes a clipping service on crack – a lot like what PubSub was offering (although only RSS) before their demise.

Transparency is good for companies. Transparency is good for governments. Transparency is good for non-profits/NGOs/Organizations, etc. It may not be so great for individuals who want more privacy. What Dave is describing is the ability to look/watch/catch up with someone – its the root of something cool. I want to keep an eye on the people/groups/structures who affect our lives (governments), our well-being (HMOs, Hospitals), our finances (companies we invest in, the IRS, the Federal Reserve). If I trusted them all, they could put out their RSS feeds and I would watch.
It applies to pretty much any niche (woodworking, democratic politics, people, NY Yankees, Classic Chevys, Gourmets, Real Estate, etc.).

I love my aggregator because it pulls from the affinity groups/communities (blogs, news organizations) that interest me. Take Dave’s idea a step further, and give me a web/blog/news aggregator that pulls all of the video and audio clips that fit my criteria (let’s say, a local election):

• a soundbyte from the radio
• a clip from cnn
• a video blogger who does an interview about the candidate
• blog posts from folks who live or work on the campaign

Put it in RSS and it plays through my video aggregator as a channel (WHoooooooHOoooo Democracy Player).

We are becoming the editors (blogs), radio personalities (podcasting), video stars (video blogging) and network programmers (RSS, Aggregators, The Democracy Player).

This is Fun.

Welcome to C-Ville – Where Choices Define You

C-Ville is an all-Flash site that teaches kids/teens about the risks of smoking, why making good choices are important, and why choosing not to smoke is important short and long term.

While I agree with the message, the execution is what really stands out. From the music to the grapihcs, the video shorts used in the production, the overall look and feel just clicks. It is fun and immersive and gives users a reason to explore and click and check things out with a really open and not-intuitive-in-a-good-way navigation. The look and feel brings you in, feels immersive and has a ton of objects on each screen to play with.

From the AdRants post:

Final Cut’s Carlos Arias explains the approach saying, “Kids are so sophisticated these days so we don’t need to make the message obvious. This is a new way of communicating with youth — by not spoon-feeding them.”

Kudos to these guys for coming up with a smart design, solid execution, good message and real appreciation and respect for the user. While the site loads slow on the network here in the bunker, the video encodes are really tight and the payoff is there – it frickin works.

I am digging into Second Life more and more and found the link above today (thanks PSFK!). This team has put together a magazine for and about SL business. The topics are neat, the layout is pretty good and they even have advertisers.

THe most interesting thing about the story is this:

You have the potential to reach for your dreams. The team of SL Business Magazine is proof of that. I am deployed in a war zone with the US Army in Afghanistan. I can escape the shattered terrain and death outside my mud and plaster building when I create an exciting and beautiful world full of friendships inside Second Life. It also allows our Creative Director in China to provide you with the stunning designs found in this issue. Our Editor in Canada can easily meet with our Copy Editor and Sales Manager in the United States. We have contributors from locations such as Australia, Germany, Japan and other global locations. So the point here is the obvious! And that is the idea behind our motto: Reaching. Connecting.

This is actually really well done. I cant wait to see issue 2

Shot on green screen, probably using HD and a sick edit/motion graphics/Flash build. When I was working at iNDELIBLE we did more than a few of these, all of which were great – but nothing like this…

Nice work guys

http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=218493

I love Ad parodies, and this is a great ‘hack’ of the current MS vs. MAC ads running out there now.

Now I am a PC guy, but my buddies David and Ace have me thinking more and more about getting a MAC.
click thru and see…

Well, golly, look at this. I get a comment‘ on the post below from someone who says he’s working for Dell:

Hey Jarvis. I honestly think you have no life. Honestly? Do you have a life, or do just spend it trying to make Dell miserable. I’ve been working with Dell the past three weeks researching trashy blogs that worms like you leave all over that frigen blogosphere and I cant honestly say that Dell is trying to take a step towards fixing their customer service. They hire guys like me to go on the web and look through the blogs of guys like you in hopes that we can find out your problem and fix it. But honestly I dont think you have a problem Dell can fix. Your problem is you have no life.

The guy who left that post was too chicken to leave his or her last name. But Chris did leave his or her domain and it does, indeed, come from GCI Group, a division of Grey Worldwide, the giant ad agency. GCI brags that it is working for Dell, “Rebuilding Corporate Reputation Through Grassroots Effort.”

The net-net is Chris’ supervisor at GCI pinged back to say that Chris was a summer intern whose opinions didn’t reflect GCI or Dell.

Stories like that make my job, and the jobs of a lot of other people in the tech/creative/marketing nexus that much more difficult.

Clients arent stupid. They know the blogosphere exists. Companies want to participate in the bigger conversation and ‘play in the sandbox’. It takes time, and handholding, and justification and examples and a really solid framework to get clients off the sidelines.

You spend a lot of time educating the client on the social mores and rituals and expectations of the blogosphere. You talk about how the idea of linking away from the site brings users back. You spend time explaining how RSS, trackback and pings work.

You spend a lot of time showing how blogging is different. You spend even more time talking about authenticity, honesty, true voices and putting a human face on a corporation. You spend a lot of time discussing the ‘scary’ side of blogging: not controlling the message, users having a forum that you cant shut down, a blogger going ‘off message’ when we arent trying to control a message but start a conversation.

You give them as much info as possible to make a decision. You show them how they can participate in the blogosphere without ‘shilling’ or being obnoxious. You guide them down the road. You get the clients thatclose.

And then some summer intern does something like the above. I would love to see the Dell one2one blog discuss this tomorrow. Hell, maybe they will even bring up the fact that some people have had serious customer service problems (like Jarvis). We shall see.

I am not going to stop pitching clients on the value of blogging and how they can get involved. Stories like the above go into my “blogging mistakes we can learn from’ slide in the deck.

http://adage.com/digital/article?article_id=110404 

What’s special here is us participating in a new phase of the social-networking evolution,” said Mr. Schionning.

Avatars

Construction

Land

Cool spaces (art gallery, fan-built MYST game, record label online with lounge for listening to artists)

Quick primer on buildinf objects in 2L

AWESOME – easily the best pres so far today

How do fans interact

how to give power back

2 spaces – stage and audience space – existed since greek times

power of fan, power of audience

participatory culture

REM – SD 2003 – estab norms of space

fans determin the set list

bands control over the audience becomes complicated

audience organzied by another algo – profiles in range of clusters to go see who to go meet

discussion board going on thru sms

henry jenkins – aprticipatory cultuere

where there is no diff fro mthe fan and the band

hier of control breaking – artifacts of culture (Mp3s movies) and discourse (board, blogs) – never happened before

implications of media give more weght to what is being said

settled in their own hierarchies

author subj to the qual or representation in the internet age

onus of authoritative voice – ceases for content providers and now sits with the audience

fleetwood mac – end to end didnt listen to users

now – producers and consumers are a lot closer

headautomatica.com

diff between consume an dproduce has been reduced and the barriers are completely gone

building out infrastructure for what we want to see for ourselves

making money and ads – hodlover form the old way of thinking

how to do it without a liquidity event

want to talk about boring things – prob where people think you need to have a success – not the case

53k – the size of our echo chamber – how do we find work that is rewarding AND makes a difference

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/06_06/b3970110.htm

Getting Creative With Mad Ave
To find the right agency, MINI Cooper devised a quirky trial-by-immersion

I have been walking the edges of this topic for a while, not really getting in there and taking a closer look thanks to clients and deadlines and the usual lifestuff. I started looking closer thanks to Doc Searls excellent posts on the subject at his blog and his IT Garage. I decided to do a deeper dig after reading his recent SuitWatch column in Linux Journal. It fits incredibly well with the idea of Attention as defined by Steve Gillmore and the Attention Trust.

Doc on identity:

The real problem is the absense of something we’ve needed all along: Independent Identity, owned by the individual, rather than granted by outside commercial and governmental bodies. With Independent Identity, sovereign individuals could selectively present credentials and do business, anywhere on the Net (or in the physical world, for that matter), without being forced to obtain “membership” or whatever. Their private information (memberships, preferences, transaction histories, attention data) would reside with the equivalent of a bank or a broker, and would be represented to others in a way that revealed only what the transaction, conversation or relationship required.

As defined by the trust, Attention is:

… the substance of focus. It registers your interests by indicating choice for certain things and choice against other things. Any time you pay attention to something (and any time you ignore something), data is created. That data has value, but only if it’s gathered, measured, and analyzed.

Attention is about my time AND focus, what and how I spend my attention on depends not on some programming wonk at a major network, but depends on my likes and dislikes. Identity is about my self, how I identify myself to the world, how I exchange my identity for access or content, or commerce and what information I allow marketers to take away and use. The only way I can exchange or monetize my attention is through some process that interacts with my identity. But my identity is not required for others to monetize my time (think CPM).

It all comes down to control. The Ad Guy in me is scared to death of that. Direct Advertising (Below the line) is based on getting the right message to the right person at the right time in the right medium. Lack of control, the user determining what information a marketer can see/kee/share with partners. scares the shit out of the ad industry the same way timeshifting (what do you mean you allow them to skip my commercials) or napster (what do you mean they can share my music) scared the big media companies.

If they control their own eyeballs, how do we make any money off of them?

Marketers and their agencies would rather not engage in the discussion at all. Trust us, they say. Give us you information and we will customize/personalize our content to what you want. Exchange your identity with our network and we will give you all kinds of stuff – as long as you dont ever leave (it is our competitve advantage after all). If you lock yourself in to our proprietary platform/software/distribution mechanisms, we will give you almost everything you think you want – except choice – choice in what we spend our attention on and the choice of what parts of our identity to share.

Kim’s post can be found here.

Find the entire article here:
http://www.infoworld.com/article/05/09/21/HNinfocard_1.html

This is a blog/comic strip about a creative team at a big agency (based on real events, client names changed to protect the living and the account guy’s sanity).

They say it is:

Words & Pictures is, to the best of our knowledge, the only comic strip about the adventures of a creative team in a large advertising agency. Too stupid to create avatars that would give us plausible deniability, everything in the comic is 100% true — with the notable exception of anything that would make us look bad or get us sued. That stuff’s made up. New strips are posted every Monday. You can also join our mailing list to stay on the cutting edge of new-strippery.

Very fun… check out the “Dodge Smegma” from Aug 15

Excellent distillation of the Long Tail and required reading.

The theory of the Long Tail is that our culture and economy is increasingly shifting away from a focus on a relatively small number of “hits” (mainstream products and markets) at the head of the demand curve and toward a huge number of niches in the tail. As the costs of production and distribution fall, especially online, there is now less need to lump products and consumers into one-size-fits-all containers. In an era without the constraints of physical shelf space and other bottlenecks of distribution, narrowly-target goods and services can be as economically attractive as mainstream fare.

I use Mini as an example of great online creative execution of a configurator with clients just because it is so well done, so consistent with the other brand executions and because I frickin love the cars (my buddy Ace at East India Branding is an unpaid evangelist/nutcase for Mini). VW has a larger product line, wider demographics and different value proposition than Mini. It will be fun to see how they enhance the brand and work with the personalities of each of the cars.

Thanks to AdPulp for the pointer.