GROUP Y PARTNERS WITH NEMO ON ACTION SPORTS ONLINE MARKETING AND THE SOCIAL WEB EVENT
“Who Killed Social Media?”—A Panel Discussion On Social Media Vs. The Social Web

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: Carlsbad, CA. – May 19th, 2009 – Portland, Oregon-based integrated marketing agency Nemo today announced their partnership with group Y of Carlsbad, California, to host a panel discussion in Portland on the evening of June 4th, 2009. The discussion will focus on incorporating and effectively implementing social web strategies in the marketing mix.

The June 4th panel marks the first nationally-produced event for group Y. Co-Founder and CEO at group Y, Elizabeth Randall commented, “We are very much looking forward to holding our first national group Y event at Nemo HQ. They are a perfect partner for group Y—not only as a result of our long-standing relationship with them, but because they truly understand the action sports and youth markets, and are constantly pushing the boundaries of creative marketing and online strategies. Nemo’s headquarters will be the ideal gathering place to tackle the ins and outs of social media as well as do some group Y style-socializing.”

Nemo’s Founder and GM, Trevor Graves added, “We’re excited to have the action sports industry at Nemo to learn about the Social Web. Our friends at group Y have helped set up an expert panel to explain what all the fuss is about. Using the Social Web to communicate one-on-one with our customers can help achieve the holy grail of brand loyalty.”

Included on the panel are Tony Welch, Web, Community and Social Media strategist from Hewlett Packard; action sports industry veteran Lee Crane, James Todd of Twine, Lead Information Architect at K2 Sports and creator of Ridertech, Matt Savarino, and Nemo’s own Dave Allen, founder of the music site Pampelmoose.com, Director of Insights and Digital Media and Community Director at Nemo and founding member of the band Gang of Four. The moderator Marshall Kirkpatrick, Vice President of Content Development, and lead writer for ReadWriteWeb, will navigate the panelists through the world of the Social Web as it is today, and where it will lead in the near future.

To register for the event, please click here.

About group Y
group Y is the original collective of professionals focused on Action Sports, Youth Marketing and Entertainment. Based in Southern California with a growing national reach, group Y boasts an active membership of the best and brightest these industries have to offer. Sharing insights from key decision makers at key brands, past speakers have included experts from companies such as Quiksilver, Burton, Oakley, MySpace, and ESPN. Through our events, outreach and on-line presence, group Y takes the work out of strategic networking and strengthens our entire industry in the process. Please visit us at www.groupYnetwork.com

About Nemo
Nemo means Nobody. Highly collaborative, integrated marketing that is media agnostic. The biggest ideas, the best context, and the deepest impact are all we’re concerned about as we build visionary brands. We use (or invent) whatever media and tools will resonate within a culture. “Does it change the game?” is our collective mission as we evolve interactive design, social networks, PR, environmental design, print design, photography, entertainment and original content.
For more information on Nemo click here.

For more information please contact:
Becky Singh
Communications
503-734-5094
becky@nemohq.com

In the current economic climate it goes without saying that most small businesses have been feeling their share of the pain. Of course, depending on which particular sector of an industry your company has the most experience in also determines the number of times the dice will roll in your favor; some industries thrive throughout downturns others suffer as their clients suffer – hard and fast decisions have to be made almost weekly to keep a company on course. Nemo is thriving but we had to make a course correction.

Unfortunately, this week, Nemo had to make a very hard decision to lay off 9 of our employees; 9 very smart, gifted and intelligent workers, who through no fault of their own find themselves suddenly without a job. People are the backbone of every company so it goes without saying that their loss is also Nemo’s loss.

In the end we are all human and of course like every company should we care about our laid off employees welfare. To help them we decided to turn first to the power of the community and social media by using our Twitter account. By noon on the day of the lay offs I sent out a message [or tweet] to the community explaining the cuts, but more importantly letting companies know that if they needed these skilled workers they could get in touch directly with me or Nemo. It worked.

I was blown away at how fast the response to my tweet was. Obviously in such a tight-knit community there was an outpouring of goodwill and good lucks etc but, most importantly, more than five companies and/or individual business owners reached out to us for info about our released staff. The result was that some of the Nemo alumni were in job interviews as soon as the next day. Obviously good news all around and it’s worth pointing out the power of Twitter and reaching out to your supportive community online.

Our message on Twitter.

And a typical response and re-Tweet.

When the Nemo alumni land new jobs, and if they are willing to have me share the details, I will post them up here.

Follow us on Twitter: @NemoHQ

Adam Bagerski’s Surprise 30th party Feb 27th 2009 from Dave Allen on Vimeo.

Nemo-branded Skullcandy 2XL Booth at CES 2009 from Dave Allen on Vimeo.

CES is always overwhelming but it was sweet to see NemoHQ client Skullcandy’s booth pop out on the crowded trade show floor.

Portland electronic duo, Little Hunks

Social Cache is but one window into the world of Nemo HQ. The multi-talented Nemo designer, fashionista and blogger Nubby Twiglet and myself post up to Social Cache as often as time will allow between posting to our respective blogs NubbyTwiglet.com and Pampelmoose. The Nemo blog world also includes StudioNemo and Roger Bridges’ Strange|Beautiful and all these blogs feed the Nemo cultural hopper.

Another spin-off is the Pampelmoose New Music Hour that airs twice a week on 94.7FM KNRK, Portland’s biggest alternative radio station. The show is dedicated to bringing the on-air audience as much of the best new music we can squeeze in to an hour as well as playing as much local Portland music as we can. All the songs are then posted to Pampelmoose and archived for streaming or downloading.

This is the final 2008 Pampelmoose edition of the New Music Hour on Portland’s 94.7FM and it’s time to take stock of all the great music that I’ve been able to play from Portland’s vibrant music scene. I have 14 songs from some of Portland’s finest. They are by no means ranked in any order, nor are they songs necessarily from ‘08 releases, just a selection from many songs that I could have played. The choice was difficult but having room for only 14 bands forced my hand. To those that didn’t make the list be assured that in ‘09 you will be played on the show and maybe the list will be longer next year and I can accommodate more bands…just keep the great music coming.

Hockey – Song Away
Starfucker – Holly
Little Hunks – Came To Party
Lackthereof – The Columbia
Holy Sons – The Feral Kid
Peter Broderick – With The Notes In My Ears
The Mint Chicks – 2010
Red Fang – Reverse Thunder
The Shaky Hands – We Are Young
James Low – American Dream
The Wherewithals – The Point
Bark Hide and Horn – Change It
Loch Lomond – Blue Lead Fence
Microfilm – Fox And His Friends

Stream or download all the previous Pampelmoose 94.7FM shows here.

Liz trying an ice cold Coors

We can never get enough, we have to always come back for more. The StudioNemo RSVP list stood at 1,532 by the afternoon of Oct 31st. On the night the lines were long, both to get in and to get a drink, but people persevered and the vibe was one of mass fun, good times. If you were at the party you can watch the slideshow above to find yourself or check out our Flickr page. Here’s to next year!

Brent Terrazas thinks so – “This is disturbing – Don’t say I didn’t warn you. It’s a recent commercial for Domino’s Pizza that features a rapping “Pasta Dude” who gets knocked down by ‘the man’ (or rather, ‘the mom’). It seems like they were going over the top in an effort to be funny, however this is one of the worst commercials I can remember watching in a LOOOOOONG time.”

Oh well….at least it’s being discussed.

B-Day ride to Bend 08 from Steve Hoskins Jr. on Vimeo.

Two of our Nemo guys, Steve and Morgan, grab the bikes and head Southeast from Portland, climb over Mt Hood, ride through the reservation via Madras, stop off in Redmond and finally hit Bend. Amazing.

Nemo teamed up with Fuel TV to promote their show Dew Underground about the Dew Tour in Portland. We came up with the dewy and sticky idea of collaborating with Voodoo Doughnuts to create the Mountain Dew doughnut, known from here-out as the Voo Dew!

Voo Dew Doughnut – Nemo and the Dew Tour from Dave Allen on Vimeo.

Nemo’s Chris Hotz explains the process that leads up to a special doughnut – it ain’t simple…

i suppose i should let bare my past for this project. you see, from the time i was 16 thru 23, i was on a strictly mountain dew diet. i didn’t drink water, or milk, or beer, or god forbid, coke products, ONLY mountain dew. at one point the Dew people told me i was drinking so much it was bad for my heart and i needed to stop. instead i asked for some coupons and like good americans, they gladly obliged. so with that in mind, this collaboration was actually pretty easy to come up with. the AST Dew tour only happens in a few very lucky cities, portland being one of only five venues. so as a city, we’re pretty fortunate.. we started to think about how lucky portland is to have such a cool and creative culture. those, “Keep Portland Weird” stickers are for a reason. as far as portland-centric institutions, Voodoo Doughnuts is one kick ass independent doughnut shop. i mean seriously, a maple bacon bar, genius… it almost seems like they make doughnuts that they dare you to eat. so as we started brainstorming, we threw out the idea of a Mountain Dew flavored doughnut. and honestly, i was thinking more about the color and the presentation, but when we contacted the VooDoo guys, they we’re all about getting the flavor JUST right. boiling down Mountain Dew into a syrupy reduction, lemon lime additives, caffeine powders, adding lemon sprinkles, laboring the color of the frosting. the first taste tests were unbelievable. the second test brought back memories from my childhood. damn i’m thirsty.

Modernista [you have to love their web site] and the Stop Handgun Violence organization have rolled out their campaign. Check it out.

Nike 6.0 at StudioNemo from Dave Allen on Vimeo.

Video of Josh Letchworth shooting 6.0 athletes Ben Horan, Nigel Sylvester and Trevor Jacob at StudioNemo.

Is it art? Is it life? Is it jeans? Advertising Agency FFL Paris, France and its Executive Creative Directors Fred & Farid have decide to take the “high art” road to advertising Wrangler Jeans. This means we can have arty photos that reek of misogyny – half-naked women who’ve apparently been murdered and thrown into lakes and rivers. Judging by all the negative remarks over at Ads Of The World’s web site the campaign isn’t going over so well.

Nemo’s Creative Director Mark Lewman and me were riffing on his idea of how a company’s work and overall business can be validated in an era of Google, YouTube, Wikipedia and radical transparency et al. The bottom line that we seemed to arrive at is that it is not good enough to deliver good work these days – anyone can do good work. The task at hand is to be trusted to create amazing work and then, when your amazing work is discovered, fame will surely follow.

Here’s Mark’s distilled thoughts so far:
Success in the 21st century means finding balance between two timeless elements Trust and Fame. Your work is who you are. This is the part of the equation you control. To stand out today, everything you do must be awesome. When people encounter what you produce they must find substance and excellence. Just because an idea can be relied upon as great doesn’t mean it automatically wins. It isn’t complete until it has believers; distribution and exposure make an idea stronger and add value through cultural validation. As trust and reliability grows so should the fame.

Jeff Jarvis provides an extension of these thoughts when he writes on Buzzmachine – “All content must be transparent: open on the web with permanent links so it can receive links. It’s not content until it’s linked.”

And then, looking beyond transparency at the barriers to creative expression and its dissemination, it is worth remembering this point that Jarvis recounts elsewhere in ‘The Myth of the Creative Class‘ after he has reconsidered his views on copyright law and realizes that a too stringent application of copyright infringement can stifle the spread of what has been created – “when creations are restricted it is the creator who suffers more because his creation won’t find its full and true public, its spark finds no kindling, and the fire dies. The creative class, copyright, mass media, and curmudgeonly critics stop what should be a continuing process of creation; like reverse alchemists, they turn abundance into scarcity, gold into lead.”

Dreamy, carefree video episodes extolling the beach culture delights of 10 Cane Rum. Brought to us by Mother, NY. There are more of these here.

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Studio Nemo is always hopping and it always gets the good stuff! This shoot was for Nike 6 with photographer Josh Letchworth behind the lens. The Nike 6.0 athletes were in town for Migration, a week of fun-filled activity and work all rolled into one. It’s like a giant meet and greet for all these kids from different areas of action sports.

That’s not a boast. Another answer to that question is simple; if you write a blog, you own PR too.

Press releases by the thousands hit editors desks and inboxes daily. The best editors have no doubt created a system for separating the wheat from the chaff when it comes to a good story, but they are still gatekeepers although their gates are becoming smaller and easier to bound over. We are in the age of PR 2.0 as Brian Solis calls it. He as written a paper entitled ‘The Social Media Manifesto – Integrating Social Media into Marketing Communications.‘ He spells out his case very succinctly and avoids most of the jargon that you might expect in a paper on this subject [although some clichés remain.] You can read it here.

A Press Release? Here’s one definition from many that I found online – ‘An announcement of an event, performance, or other newsworthy item that is issued to the press.’ The definition is straightforward and very, very dry, a phrase that unfortunately describes every press release I’ve ever seen. So how does your story get noticed through the crowds and the white noise?

You could go crazy with all the options that are available but I’m thinking that a less is more approach may be more effective. Again common wisdom suggests that you should use Digg, Del.icio.us, MyBlogLog, Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, etc, etc. Although those tools are all undoubtedly useful, the problem is that you have to manage all of these accounts and that is time consuming. Also is your story relevant, to say your Facebook group? In fact have you asked yourself – “Does my company even need a Facebook group?” Just because you can doesn’t mean you should. And of course this all begins with the best story that you have to tell, otherwise all of your efforts using any social media will fail. A non-story is a non-story, period.

This is our current approach at Nemo:

We have multiple blogs and bloggers and we experimented with social media for a while before jumping in and writing about our ideas and thoughts. Social Cache is an example of how we intend to participate as thought-leaders and contributors. We are not selling anything here.

Our blogs have distinct voices and authority in the areas of music at Pampelmoose, fashion at Nubby Twiglet, art and design at strange|beautiful and photography at Nemo Productions & Photography.

We create videos and upload them to YouTube and Vimeo [33,460 folks watched that one,] and we drop our photos off at our Flickr site.

We have a Muxtape so you can listen to what we are listening to.

We have LinkedIn profiles for all of our executive staff, here’s our Creative Director, Mark Lewman’s. We even have a Facebook group. [I'm struggling with this one, more later.]

We are lacking in the blogroll department. We need a stronger blogroll on Social Cache.

We have our own Ning social network specific to our company. It’s been in private beta but soon it will be unleashed to the world. Here’s a sneak peek of some of the Nemo team celebrating the delivery of new web sites that we built for HP Blackbird and VooDoo PC. Click those links to see our work.

Find more videos like this on NEMO

When it comes to PR and marketing at Nemo we are following the basic rules of social media. We listen and we participate. We wait to be invited in. We start conversations. We encourage comments.

And we love our employees, even when they leave us…watch the video below.

Find more videos like this on NEMO

Social Media is no longer viewed as just a hobby or a passing fad. According to Adweek, a handful of advertising and PR agencies are seeing the potential of web-based client promotion and have recently launched Social Media divisions in addition to their more traditional offerings.

As more advertising dollars continue to make their way to the internet, Brain Sells notes that “more than just ad dollars following a trend or digital hype, the growth is being driven due to real changes in behavior: (the) rising number of people online, the introduction of cheap laptops and the growing popularity of TV shows on the Internet.”

Furthermore, ChasNote shows us the migration of U.S. ad dollars in which the amount of money spent online in 2007 swelled to $21 billion, an increase of almost 26% from the previous year:

The social media teams at various agencies are becoming savvy enough to realize that buying up ad space on large networking sites like Myspace and Facebook is not necessarily the answer. Michael Nathanson, an analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein & Company states that “the jury’s still out on MySpace’s ability to monetize” and “we don’t have much conviction in the long-term ability to grow this business based on what we’ve seen lately.”

Instead, the future is pointing towards more focused ad campaigns targeted at niche blogs that have highly faithful followings. As Dave Allen, Director of Insights & Digital Media at Nemo Design says, “Companies should be advertising directly to those niche groups and networks that include people who would like to hear from their brand. (On other social media sites) the brands need to wait until they are invited in. A mass, scatter-shot approach to the large social networks will only fail.”

The bottom line: there is no quick way to propel a company to the top through social networking; it takes time and the earning of users’ trust. The competition is constantly growing and social media users are becoming increasingly savvy. Patrick Garrett, Outrider’s U.S. managing director is right when he proclaims that “social media is a long-term investment.”

Obama’s viral timepiece.

These days the advertising and marketing world is all abuzz with phrases such as – Social Media, Social Advertising, Facebook Ads, Mass Media Networking Advertising…..etc, etc.. In the last two weeks I have been a panelist at the L I S A seminar in Portland and the Hawaii MusicTech Conference in Honolulu. L.I.S.A., which is an acronym for Lessons In Social Advertising, was aimed at marketers and advertisers who [for some reason] don’t understand social networks or haven’t yet worked out how to advertise effectively to them. It focused on topics such as ‘What is social advertising?’ and ‘How do you get young people to recommend your brand?’ The Hawaii MusicTech panel discussed how musicians could effectively use social networks such as Facebook and MySpace to reach an audience and communicate with them.

Two sides of the table as it were. One group wants to advertise, or push, their messages to a mass audience, while the other wants to create a network of like-minded people who hopefully will pull content such as free MP3s and then “evangelize” on behalf of the musicians by spreading messages by electronic word of mouth. With no hint of schizophrenia I happily migrate between both camps.

To understand and embrace social networking is to place the idea that says “technology makes this possible” to one side and embrace the idea of the basic human need to stay in touch with other like-minded people at all times. As Clay Shirky says “The desire to be part of a group that shares, cooperates, or acts in concert is a basic human instinct.” Think about rock concerts for a minute…..

Most people that take a position on social networking and advertising come at it from a technological point of view, as in “technology has created the means for everyone to be connected and to stay in touch.” I disagree with that statement because it removes nature from the game. It is entirely natural for humans to want to interact as often as possible as we are all social animals. Cities are no more artificial (technological) than the hives of bees. Therefore the Internet is as natural as a spider’s web. People who believe that technology is driving our interactions are missing the point – we ourselves are technological devices, invented by ancient bacterial communities as a means of genetic survival. Bottom line – social media is as natural as apple pie as we all want to be as connected as possible – we can’t help it. [A really good book from which I have borrowed some thoughts is 'Straw Dogs' by John Gray, professor of European thought at LSE, published in the UK by Granta.]

Online networks might be seen as antidotes to boredom at work, school or college. These new social networks do more than transmit information about their members, they change behaviour by propagating moods. These days we can all share “news” really fast, even about ourselves – for example, my Facebook or Twitter status might say “I’m heading to the beach in Waikiki…” and the mood that simple statement makes might become very contagious.

The Internet confirms what we have all known for a long time – the world is ruled by the power of suggestion but in the case of social networking it is “influencers” that lead the suggesting. Then suggestions might become “group think.” John Gray writes – “in evolutionary prehistory, consciousness emerged as a side effect of language. Today it is a by product of media.”

So, the question currently being asked by companies and advertisers is “how do we market and advertise to social networks?” Having to ask that question suggests the rocky ground that online advertisers are standing on. For instance, Jack Myers sees nothing but doom and gloom in online marketing: He says “Advertising is simply not a sufficient revenue model to sustain content companies into the long-term future.” And goes on -

“I have preached evangelically for nearly three decades about the bifurcation of the media and advertising marketplace into 1) a transactional commodity business model and 2) a relationship-based brand-focused premium marketplace. Most media companies and agencies are investing appropriately in the technology resources required for their transactional businesses. [But] Brand building, relationship-based business models and premium-priced enterprises require completely new and innovative models, and can take years before they generate returns that justify the investments. Industry realities place enormous pressure on executives to adhere to traditional business models, and companies that foster and advance innovation are often drained of resources before they can deliver the return-on-investment demanded by the stock market, equity rights holders and VC investors. Typically, implementation of new business models must be forcefully imposed by the CEO, need the blessing of investors, and they cannot be managed by executives trained exclusively in the ways of traditional media and advertising.”

Neil Perkin in a slideshow entitled ‘What’s Next in Media’ that can be found here says that today – Social Media is counter-intuitive to communications media. Here’s one of his slides that shows just how counter-intuitive things have become for marketing online:

Meanwhile, the old way of marketing is through push messaging and therein lies the mistake of many of today’s marketing managers. Take a look at this slide to see how things don’t stack up nicely into a marketing message or ‘drop’ that has been long planned waiting its turn on the calendar.

The Linear model above reminds me of traditional TV and Print advertising. Some people in advertising and marketing today still view the Internet as a “channel” rather like TV.

Let’s consider another buzz phrase – viral marketing online. The success of YouTube in extending an advertising campaigns length and reach is now common currency. We’ve all seen the videos, perhaps even this one – My girlfriend and the Wii Fit. 2.2 million views and going strong.

The viral aspect of YouTube pleases advertisers and marketers because they can take pride in the statistics – 2.2 million viewers, that’s great! Not so quick though. The wise online marketer knows that it’s not all about page impressions. Broad use of metrics is far more important – users, time-spent, interactions and pass-alongs. The Wii certainly got a lot of exposure in that video but how can the results be tracked? Where’s the ROI?

Those YouTube stats don’t show the whole picture. It is clear that the video is very popular and it fits the rules of users, time-spent, interactions and pass-alongs, but there is no clear ROI except in its “value.” By value I mean that the brand is being talked about, the brand via the video is being shared, people are “spending time” with the brand. The ROI though is difficult to judge. Even if Wii sales were to jump by 5% in one week can we really say it was due to this “viral” campaign. Probably not. The video’s value will continue throughout its lifetime on YouTube. Talk of value over ROI makes marketing managers queazy.

Viral campaigns are not just online. From Adrants: Jack Goldenberg tells the story of how he and Kevin Glennon turned a custom-made Obama for President watch into what could become a fairly sizable viral campaign for the candidate.

“Most people think of viral marketing as something they’ve seen on YouTube or a similar site. But in reality, a viral is any communication that causes one person to be so affected by “experiencing” the viral that they communicate it to another.” He also argues that “Happy Meal toys were an in-home reminder of the need to visit McDonald’s. Kids would see two or three of them on their desk in their room and say, “Mom, Dad, we HAVE to go back to McDonald’s. I need 3 more Star Treks Happy Meals to complete my collection…..the Happy Meal was viral – kid to parent-multiplied by the millions of kids who frequented McDonald’s.”

That’s an example of an early viral campaign. We can perceive its “value” but we can’t perceive its ROI. And that’s why Jack Myers, as I quoted above, says “(completely new, innovative models) can take years before they generate returns that justify the investments.” If as marketers we don’t understand social media and merely pay lip service to viral marketing then we are basically flying by the seat of our pants.

Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief of Wired Magazine and blogger at The Long Tail, has pitched in to the social media advertising conversation with a post entitled You may be on Facebook But the Money’s in the Long Tail. He also posits that “social networks should be a feature, not a destination.”

As Chris says, and I agree, “I’ve been thinking a lot about how to integrate social networking into websites better. Right now the world is focused on stand-alone social networking sites, especially Facebook and MySpace, and the fad of the moment is to take brands and services there, as companies build Facebook apps and MySpace pages in a bid to follow the audience wherever they happen to be. But at the same time there’s a growing sense that elements of social networking is something all good sites should have, not just dedicated social networks. And that suggests a very different strategy – social networking as a feature, not a destination.”

He has a proviso too – “social networking to me means the tracking of individual preferences and behavior and giving users the ability to draw upon implicit or explicit connections between them and other users to do something useful.” This brings me to Ning, a social network platform that both Chris and I like. As he says “Ning, suppresses its own brand for the sake of those of the microsites it hosts.” Go here to see how the hip hop/rap label, Rawkus, uses Ning as its entire web presence.

Chris goes on to say – “As I think about the current Facebook craze and the notion of it as an all-encompassing platform, sucking in functionality from other sites across the board, I find myself skeptical. With my Long Tail hat on, I think that one-size-fits-all will fail in social networking, just as it has everywhere else.”

Meanwhile MySpace admits that it is not making as much money through ads as it would like. See Selling Ads For MySpace is Hard Work. MySpace COO Peter Chernin said:

“We remain incredibly optimistic about social media. But there are specific challenges 1) Tons of inventory. Lack of scarcity creates a liquidity challenge. Working on bringing big brands aboard. 2) People who are visiting social networks are there for different reasons, different uses. Figuring out how to target. 3) What’s the value of a “friend”? Trying to figure out new metrics to communicate with marketers.”

Bottomline: It’s the wild, wild west out there.

Anderson points out that ad rates on MySpace go for an astonishingly low $0.13 cents per CPM (one thousand impressions.) So that’s $0.13 on a general-purpose social network like MySpace and on his Ning-hosted network DIYDrones he’s getting $7.00. Even with a more generous scenario–$0.50 on MySpace and $5.00 on a focused Ning site–the difference is still a factor of ten. He believes that as big networks like Facebook and MySpace struggle to target ads based on the faint signals of consumer behavior in a generic social network, the smart money is going to the niche sites, where laser-focused content and community makes targeting easy. I couldn’t agree more. Also see: Facebook Ads Don’t Rock an experiment by Bob Gilbreath, an advertising executive who ran an ad on Facebook. It’s a real eye-opener. And another – Ad CPMs Are Higher In The Tail. And of course companies are springing up that think they have the answer to your problems in dealing with big social networks. Here’s one.

What this all points to is that companies should be advertising directly to those niche groups and networks that include people who would like to hear from their brand. The brands need to wait until they are invited in. A mass, scatter-shot approach to the large social networks will only fail.

Companies also need to consider Radical Transparency. For those unaware of this concept there’s a great article here on Wired Magazine’s site. I also wrote about it myself when Wired’s web site crashed. The basis of this theory is that you open the company’s doors [only as much as you like] by creating communication between your company and its fans and detractors. It’s a big step and for some, especially executives, it will cause a great deal of unease.

Wal-Mart used this approach to great effect. Here’s the original story from the New York Times and here’s just one bloggers’ reaction. And here is the Wal-Mart blog.

As the NYT article says “Known for its strict, by-the-books culture — accepting a cup of coffee from a supplier can be a firing offense — Wal-Mart is now encouraging its merchants to speak frankly, even critically, about the products the chain carries. This unusual new Web site, which was quietly created during the holiday shopping season, has become a forum for unvarnished rants about gadgets, raves about new video games and advice on selecting environmentally sustainable food.

Corporate blogs are nothing new — General Motors, Dell and Boeing have them — but Wal-Mart’s site, called Check Out, turns the traditional model on its head. Instead of relying on polished high-level executives, it is written by little-known buyers, largely without editing.”

And the key point there is “without editing.” Once a company opens the doors it can not close them. If a company starts a blog [and it should] it can not moderate the comments. And the CEO and other executives should not be contributing to the blog if they do not have the right “authority” or “voice”. By that I mean authenticity. It’s an overused word at times but in the right context it is completely accurate. If a CEO were to jump on the blog to blow her own trumpet non-critically about a company’s service or product the readers would see through it immediately. Being authentic means the blog author is a “trusted source” and this trust can never be abused.

A blog is a micro social network. My blog garners around 100,000 unique visits a month and its adherents are seeking out what I have to say about music, technology and the web. I am well versed in those things. I have an opinion about them. I also provide free music downloads from artists that I have “filtered.” I only post music from artists that I like and I believe that my audience will like them too. In short I have become a trusted source [people like my opinions,] a filter [people share my musical tastes,] and I am an influencer [I push certain artists and online companies that I support,] as well as an authority [people believe that I know what I am talking about.] A company’s blogger or bloggers need to have all these bases covered if they are going to safely cover the company’s communications through the blog.

Meanwhile the executives have to sit back and allow the comments, both good and bad, begin to flow. They can never interfere if they want the blog to be taken seriously. They will feel insecure and perhaps a little nauseous but if they wait it out it will work fine. It works for Wal-Mart, the world’s biggest retailer.

A company with a good blog policy will be listening to its customers and then shaping its communications around that data. It will also create content that is both relevant and hopefully surprising. Influencers will pass along the good stuff creating the viral moment that marketers pray for. Then people in the outer circle of the influencers will also start to talk about the brand, and as they do the company has to make it very easy for its core fans to spread the word. Do not fear negativity, it is just more communication – let it roll. There should never be a barrier to communication or interactivity. Remember, it’s not about technology, it’s about people. Bloggers have to be about having an opinion and sharing it but never about reporting….it’s a two-way conversation.

Sometimes people look at it backwards. Points 1 and 2 in this slide are wrong. As I said at the beginning of this post, we are technological beings and we are naturally immersed in technology; it can’t be any other way. And you can’t enforce social cultures online as there is no central “being.” Facebook’s “soul” is merely the millions of disparate people who are members. When Facebook goes away, as it will, those millions will migrate to the next application that allows them to socialize freely and easily.

For marketers this is a huge dilemma. In social media we create a selfless or virtual “self” – for instance, in the Facebook friends network one might see a coherent global pattern but that pattern only emerges from the activity of all its members (friends). The group or network seems to be centrally located but in fact it is nowhere to be found. No one has the slightest idea what these people do or want; they actually don’t exist. The good news is that within each of any of these social network groups resides at least a couple of influencers; again, companies and brands must wait to be invited in. These are parties that can’t be crashed.

Dave Allen, Director, Insights & Digital Media, Nemo Design.

The following URLs link to people, companies, articles or stories that are referred to in this post:

Grammy’s Hawaii MusicTech Conference
LISA 08
Content Marketing = Brand New Marketing
What’s Next In Media
My Facebook profile
My Twitter
My music and technology blog, Pampelmoose
Clay Shirkey’s blog
Jack Myers’ Web Site
Neil Perkin’s Blog
Wii Fit YouTube video
Adrants Obama watch story
Obama watches web store
Wired Magazine
You may be on Facebook but the money’s in the Long Tail
Social networks should be a feature not a destination
Rawkus, a social network on Ning
Selling ads on MySpace is hard work
Bob Gilbreath’s Facebook ad experiment
Ad CPMs are higher in the tail
Lotame.com
Blog reaction to Wal-Mart blogs
NYT story on Wal-Mart blog
WalMart blog

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Nemo hosted Shayla Hason’s Hope Is A Muscle photo exhibition last night. Here’s the video with Shayla discussing her work with the Portland Rock N Roll Camp for Girls.

There is no business more maligned right now than the music business so it’s always a surprise to me to find that brands and their agencies haven’t been following the story. Where once every college students dream was to graduate and land that much-sought-after job in the mail room at Warner Bros Records, I would argue today that they are far more interested in joining Google or one of the myriad of new media start-ups rather than getting a job at, or being signed to, the now unsexy music business. In fact one of them is no doubt creating a new, new, new media company as I write.

And then along comes Macys’ American Rag brand campaign – from AdWeek under news, non-traditional – a series of documentary Webisodes will follow the lives of five young people who want to break into the music business. The series, “Ragged Road,” launches in the fall. WPP Group-owned MEC Entertainment developed the show, which will play on YouTube. Nancy Slavin, svp of marketing at Macy’s merchandising group, said this marks a first for the brand in “doing something wholly dedicated to a communications strategy on the Web.”

So Macys’ merchandising group has plunged head first into a web-only strategy. Brave. The clothing brand targets 18-24 year-old males and females and they have deduced that music is one of the passions of this demos primary targets – true, but – music is just one of the passions not the primary passion.

“There’s a lot of people who want to get into the music industry, but don’t know how to go about it. So, we said, let’s find five people who have a passion for the business and want to see what the career opportunities are and what different paths there are to get into the music industry,” said Chet Fenster, managing partner at MEC. – I believe that statement is rather insulting to kids today, it sounds like a justification for making the webisodes rather than reinforcing a need that came out of a focus group session with young people.

All five cast members will be wearing American Rag clothing. They will also be given the opportunity to shop for the brand as they travel across the country. For YouTube users interested in buying the clothes, the Macy’s site will serve as a shopping portal.

Cast members huh? I don’t understand why the agency didn’t find a cool young band that are actually working hard on the road but are struggling to make it. That would have been the truly authentic route to go. Driving a bunch of “cast members” around the country on a bus and giving them “the opportunity to shop for the brand” as they go doesn’t sound so compelling to me. A more authentic way into the music market was showcased recently by Dennys, the restaurant chain, with their Adopt-A-Band campaign where they picked up touring bands and gave them a helping hand in the way Kids like their fashion to be unique. of free meals and other opportunities. Bands and music fans are very nocturnal and always hungry at after hours so this made sense in many ways. Dressing up a “band” in American Rag outfits and giving them a bus to travel on is so fake. It doesn’t take into account the harsh reality for thousands of young touring bands in the USA (gas at $4 bucks a gallon anyone?) nor does it take into account young kids’ propensity for mashing up their fashion sense into something unique, their own style.

It appears that marketing and advertising companies have hit some road blocks when it comes to online advertising; perhaps road block is not the right term, multiple forks in the road may be more correct. The new, new thing for the ubiquitous panels and conferences on the subject is the question how do we wrestle and pin down users on the big social networks and push brand advertising at them?. Currently there is no simple answer to this conundrum.

In a keynote address at the Interactive Advertising Bureau conference June 2nd, the co-founder and CEO of Social Media Networks, Seth Goldstein said – “Social media is killing advertising, a few years ago people started to become more interested in each other [online] and less interested in advertising.” Currently standard banner ad response rates are under 1% and search is not geared to brand advertising therefore social media is the next frontier for major marketers to attack but how will that be done?

Social Networking offline

One problem is that there is too much focus on the big social networks such as Facebook and MySpace. Wired’s editor-in-chief, Chris Anderson, argues on his Long Tail blog that social networking should be a feature, not a destination because the one-size-fits-all model of Facebook and MySpace will eventually give way to a multitude of narrowly focused sites with social networking built in, such as the 220,000 niche networks hosted on the Ning platform. With CPM’s at rock bottom on sites like MySpace he argues that the smart money is going to the niche sites, where laser-focused content and community makes targeting easy.

Marketers need to understand that within these hundreds of thousands of niche communities brand advertising will only work if the community invites them in. The brand ads will also have to be highly relevant to the community and be content-driven at the same time. Pushing branded ads into these communities will backfire. [As a user I find the ads that Facebook pushes at me highly irritating as they have no context to the content I share with my friends.] The brand has to join in the conversation within these communities too and that means listening in on the many quiet conversations that take place all the time on the sites – the chatter could be about shoes, handbags, tech gadgets, music, film, beer who knows?

The other way that marketers could deal with this problem is to reverse their thinking. Ensure that their brand customers’ web sites have a social network feature on their respective home pages. Attract the customer to the brand site and then let the more vociferous and influential fans of the brand get the discussion going; lovers of the brand will soon follow.

It’s a woman’s world, at least this weekend. Sex and the City, the big screen spin-off of the very successful HBO series of the same name, starring Sarah Jessica Parker and Kim Cattrell, pulled in an estimated $55.7 million since opening at midnight on Thursday. Apparently by late Friday, fans were sending messages and even photographs to Parker’s cellphone of women in line outside movie theaters across the country. Making a movie about a group of female friends, for women who no doubt brought their group of friends to the cinema, looks smart. Look for copycat attempts from Hollywood.

Meanwhile, for the guys, Mad Men returns to the TV screen real soon.

Nemo Design presents Shayla Hason’s Hope is a Muscle: Photos from the Rock n’ Roll Camp for Girls exhibit opening on Friday, June 06, 2008. The show will run through Tuesday, July 01, 2008 at Nemo Design: 1875 SE Belmont Street in Portland, OR.

“It has been a great honor to watch the camp grow, and with every session to see the girls gain
knowledge, confidence and strength in a single week. As a documentary photographer, I am most interested in the small, sublime moments at camp and the interactions between the girls in the days leading up to the showcase,” said Hason, who has been taking photographs at the Rock n Roll Camp for Girls since 2001, the second year of its existence.

The Rock’n’Roll Camp for Girls, a 501(c)3 non-profit, builds girls self-esteem through music creation and performance. Providing workshops and technical training, we create leadership opportunities, cultivate a supportive community of peers and mentors, and encourage social change and the development of life skills.

Nemo Design is a Portland-based integrated branding, marketing and design shop. Nemo Design’s capabilities include brand strategy, design, motion graphics, interactive development, film, video, print and photography production.

Nemo’s search for an Executive Integrated Producer has ended – we welcome Dan Roth to the Nemo fold. With Dan we’ve added another employee who joins our long list of /slash personalities. Snowboarder, mountain biker, traveler and gourmand (so he likes good food right?) His mom grew up in South London so that’s a plus and she met his dad in NYC which might also be a plus…..and then the traveling began. Although Dan has spent a good part of his life in Portland he has also lived in Switzerland and spent 8 years in the Côte D’Ivoire on the west coast of Africa (that’s the Ivory Coast for those of you who don’t read French.) Dan joins Nemo from Lingo Systems where he spent 8 years rising from his initial position as Project Manager through Senior Project Manager to Operations Manager. Prior to that he spent 3 years as an Account Executive at TMP Worldwide a company he joined after leaving Bank Of America.

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72andSunny enrolled Mr Madonna, Guy Ritchie to helm the spot for Nike’s Arsenal footy team, The Next Level. One question – football or soccer?

In an article that is related to the previous YouTube post the NYT reports that speakers at the leadership conference of the American Association of Advertising Agencies urged the industry to stop wallowing in self-pity and get on with the challenges ahead.

Here are some of the comments:
“We should just stop talking about what was,” Tom Carroll, president and chief executive at TBWA Worldwide, part of the Omnicom Group. “It’s like driving in the fog, you’re not sure what’s ahead of you, but you have to keep driving.” Mr. Carroll acknowledged that it would be hard work to “change the way we do our business,” but called it a necessary response to the profound shifts in media, consumer behavior and technology that are remaking the advertising landscape. He illustrated his point with a rhetorical question, “How’d you like to be in the CD business?” [Ouch!]

Lee Clow, chairman and chief creative at TBWA, who in wearing onstage his trademark garb of a T-shirt, jeans and sandals was perhaps the most casually dressed speaker in the 90-year history of the conference. “Stop whining,” The new realities “shouldn’t be scary,” he said, because they offer “a huge opportunity for us” to become far more useful to marketer clients as they seek more effective ways to sell products.

I thought this was a good one – - -“If you want to participate, you’ve got to start hiring young people,” Mr. Clow said, “and don’t tell them what to do — ask them what to do.”

“Strap on your seat belts,” advised Irwin Gotlieb, chief executive at the GroupM unit of the WPP Group, which is composed of large media planning and buying agencies like MediaCom and MindShare. “In order to achieve any kind of success, we — meaning media agencies and creative agencies — are going to have to cooperate and collaborate in a very different way than we have in the past,” Mr. Gotlieb said.

“All these challenges will no doubt put a strain on all our organizations,” he added. “Every one of us will be re-engineering and re-inventing, but the end result will be a positive one.”

“The system worked well for 40, 50 years,” Mr. Silverman said, referring to the model of paid pitches that interrupt programming. “Now we have to think differently and do each other’s jobs.”

“Our studio has to think a little more like an advertising agency,” he added, “and the advertising agency has to think a little more like a studio.”

Eric E. Schmidt, the chief executive of Google, told the audience that digital media will “create new opportunities for advertisers and new opportunities for information.” He added, “The scale of this is underappreciated.”

The opportunities will come in the form of “developing new forms of storytelling,” Mr. Schmidt said.
“We’re not creative,” Mr. Schmidt said of Google, seeking to reassure the attendees that the company did not seek to usurp agency functions. “We’re sort of boring.”

Nemo Design presents Furry Kama Sutra, a photography/Video exhibition by New York based photographer Michael Cogliantry, opening on May 02, 2008. The show will run through Tuesday, June 01, 2008 at Nemo Design: 1875 SE Belmont Street in Portland, OR.

Furry Kama Sutra is the title for a new project by New York based photographer / director Michael Cogliantry.

For this series, Cogliantry captures the little seen world of Furry in a series of photographs and videos that are part position manual, part sexual sub-culture exploration.

Dressed as animal of their choice, Furries are considered the ultimate explorers of anonymous sex. In the fur suit, one can leave the confines of the computer room and venture out into other’s bedrooms, remaining totally anonymous. Groups are based largely online, but hold conventions all over the world, usually barring the media.

The collection of seven 40 x 50” color photographs poses and three video episodes
were shot at various “by-the-hour” motels around Las Vegas.

Nemo Design (Nemodesign.com) is a Portland-based integrated branding, marketing and design shop. Nemo Design’s capabilities include brand strategy, design, motion graphics, interactive development, film, video, print and photography production. Nemo Design is located at 1875 SE Belmont Street in Portland, OR.

If you are firmly committed to using only truly green products and if you care deeply about a company’s carbon footprint it would be hard to have much sympathy for Fiji Water. Without digging too deep online I found many articles that have assessed the cost and energy that is required to bottle Fiji Water and transport it to the USA. For instance, Ask Pablo at the Triple Pundit website calculated that “a bottle that holds 1 liter (of Fiji Water) requires 5 liters of water in its manufacturing process (this includes power plant cooling water).” And to deliver one bottle of Fiji Water to the USA consumes “81g of fossil fuels, 720g of water, and 153g of GHGs per bottle delivered to the US from Fiji.” Clearly this is not good news for a product that promotes distance and exoticism as its marketing advantages.

To counter this criticism the company has embraced openness and has a blog, the Fiji Green Blog. While this is a welcome move it also puts the company in to an awkward position. Their willingness to accept open comments on their site is commendable – check out the critical comments posted on the blog by the public. I have to take issue with the blog’s title though – Fiji Green. The company’s main web site is also titled Fiji Green. The use of the word ‘green’ suggests the influence of a marketer here and there is a danger in labeling a product ‘green’ when it is clearly not – the public is suspicous.

Media Post reports “According to an Ipsos Reid study conducted this spring on behalf of Icynene, seven in ten Americans either ‘strongly’ or ‘somewhat’ agree that when companies call a product “green” (meaning better for the environment), it is usually just a “marketing tactic”. Consumers appear to be wary of companies who label their products as being green, or environmentally friendly, acknowledges the report. In the US, 75% of the men believe that labeling a product green is just a marketing tactic, compared to 65% of the women.” And AdAge.com reports that although consumers “have better-than-average recall when it comes to remembering green advertising. The bad news: They aren’t buying into the claims.”

Fuji Water then is between a rock and a hard place – it needs to rethink how it markets its product to green consumers. The only bottled water that’s truly ‘green’ is the water you pour into a recycled container at home yourself from the kitchen sink. That action doesn’t conjure up visions of tropical jungles and faraway destinations but it will help reduce the environmental impact of shipping bottled water halfway around the earth.

Back in 1992 the US Government released a pdf of how to discern if a product that is marketed as ‘green’ is truly ‘green’ and made from recyclable material. And Earth Day is April 22nd.

Update April 18th 08: Bottle Maker to Stop Using Plastic Linked to Health Concerns, Canada Likely to Label Plastic Ingredient ‘Toxic’

Nemo Design Bike Polo from Pampelmoose

The Nike ad.

The man himself – Saul Williams

Will Ferrell and Heidi Klum solve the left brain vs right brain dilemma.

“My main task in writing the drawing book was to dig down underneath everything I knew about art and drawing to try to find the most fundamental level of ‘thinking’ that goes on in drawing,” she said. “What was I seeing, how was I ‘seeing’ what I was seeing, and how was I transforming those perceptions into a drawing? It makes my brain hurt even now to remember the effort required by that seemingly simple task.” – Betty Edwards in her book Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain. 

I have written many songs in my lifetime. Frantic bass lines over frenetic beats mostly, and then, in conjunction with other like-minded musicians together we formed the complete whole entity recognizable as the “song.” My all time favorite song I’ve written with others? ‘Natural’s Not In It’ with Gang of Four, found first on its ground breaking [so I'm told] debut album, Entertainment! and later as the title track to Sofia Coppola’s movie Marie Antoinette. A close second? Evaporation by another of my bands, Shriekback, from its album ‘Care’ which also made the movie soundtrack ranks being as it was in Michael Mann’s ‘prequel’ to Silence of the Lambs, Manhunter.

The act of songwriting or the forming of musical ideas is a nonverbal form of intellect; we musicians cannot ignore the artist within, the one that resides in the right hemisphere of our brains, but being a nonverbal activity it obviously can be hard to describe the process that takes place from the germ of an idea to the seeding and ultimate fruition of a song – the left, logical hemisphere of the brain is of no help here. Unfortunately for some time the idea that the partitioning of our more creative thinking, tapping a mental connection via countless synapses that form the route to the right side of our brains, was dismissed and often scorned. Of course now we know the theory has been well tested and confirmed; simply put the left side of our brain is where our language center resides; it is the logical, linear problem solving and processing half of our brain. The right side, the side I use the most I reckon, is home to spatial perception and nonverbal concepts; it is the nonlinear, high-concept source of the imagination and of pleasure. It’s my ‘ideas centre’ where the songs, the ideas and even this post come from. I write less songs these days but I write much more; two thirds of my day at Nemo Design is spent over-heating the right hemisphere of my brain.

Which brings me to creative businesses; where are they headed and who will lead them? You might be surprised to learn that the current common wisdom points to a new generation of business leaders who “get the right brain thing.” In an article in the NY Times titled Let Computers Compute. It’s The Age of The Right Brain there’s this nugget – When General Motors hired Robert A. Lutz in 2001 to whip its product development into shape, he told The New York Times about his new approach. “It’s more right brain. It’s more creative,” he said. “I see us as being in the art business,” he said, “art, entertainment and mobile sculpture, which, coincidentally, also happens to provide transportation.” [That sounds positively McLuhan - see post below.] The article goes on to point out that today someone with a master of fine arts, M.F.A., trumps someone who holds a good old M.B.A. The point made that rings loud and clear is that if G.M. says it is in the art business, every company in any other industry is, too.

My most successful songwriting was mostly in collaboration with others – the whole being greater than the sum of its parts. It was about investing in each others ideas and sharing and adding to the burgeoning art piece or project with complete openness – today we call that radical transparency; nothing hidden, nothing guarded, no walls, no barriers to entry.

So, after considering the worth of being a right-brained musician, a songwriter, a blogger, a creative who finds himself running Nemo Design’s outward-facing digital properties I’ve come to this conclusion – I’m in the right place because Nemo has been set up with tools that provide a success formula for the future [left brain,] and that the right brain is King in our business [right brain!]

At Nemo Design we need to harness the power of the collective whole, understand that at the core of the company we are fundamentally operating as a ‘right-brained unit.’ When we require logic and strategy our left brains won’t let us down but the thinking and all the fun, the pleasure centre, the high concepts and the imagination all reside to the right. We no longer need to verbalize our ideas; we can now show them interactively in motion, in film, in video, in graphics, in projections on buildings, in sculptures, in events, in our actions because actions speak louder than…. 

So what does the future look like for branding, marketing and design companies like Nemo Design and similar companies such as Anomoly, Odopod and Crispin, Porter + Bogusky?

Who innovates, who creates in collaboration with others, who shares in the wealth of knowledge and experience that employees hold in their heads? Does it have to be put in words or business plans – left brain. Or expressed creatively through drawings, film, music, design and song – right brain? If Nemo Design embraces ideas and innovation (right brain) over execution and strategy (left brain) what will it look like in 5 years?

This morning the day began with me catching up on last Sunday’s NY Times Business Page and a story entitled Thinking Outside the Company’s Box. The article discusses one of the oldest barriers to innovation amongst large technology companies – Not Invented Here, wherein even the most creative people have a persistent bias toward their own creations versus the ideas of people from other companies. As I was pondering the way companies get round this dilemma (which had me also contemplating “The Curse of Knowledge,”) I came across a blog post from Adrian Ho at Zeus Jones who’s post outlines how large companies, e.g. Apple, “don’t really use advertising agencies and instead rely upon innovative business ideas to communicate their benefits and values to their customers.” Ho mentioned in a comment elsewhere that he wasn’t touching upon an ad agency version of “Not Invented Here” known as “Not Created Here,” (in fact he’s tip-toeing around it,) but rather was making comparisons to Alex Bogusky’s “Anything and everything is an ad” quote and what Ho sees as the “dangers of ad people presenting ideas about how to run a client’s business under the banner of everything is an ad” and how he’s “seen presentations go horribly wrong” because they were built upon that premise.

Which brings us to this thought – If “everything is an ad” should businesses communicate with their customers by simply continuing to run their business and therefore do they need an ad agency at all?

What are their options? Here’s a list for starters: Radical Transparency, a Facebook Page or Group, delivering groundbreaking stylish and functional products that brand the company and change how its customers approach communication, or an unfiltered company blog written by employees. And then there’s authenticity.

Back to the beginning; Not Invented Here and Not Created Here are both roadblocks to innovation and creativity. In the first case, large companies such as Google buy up other companies that bring them an edge in new technology or an opening into a new market. In the second case, Ho argues that “Rather than creating “communications objects” that help to grow a client’s business, agencies who champion the idea that “everything is an ad” should instead be helping to magnify and extend the communication and marketing effects of the client’s own business objects.” Which really means that a cultural shift within agencies needs to take place – agency creatives have to listen to the clients ideas rather than presenting something from scratch; one size does not fit all, companies need to embrace innovative business ideas to communicate their benefits and values to their customers. This morning another article in the NY Times caught my eye – How to turn a herd….