Current.org on NPR’s Argo Project – To add depth to web news, stations try going ‘vertical’

Published in Current, June 10, 2009
By Karen Everhart

Looking to advance public radio’s standing as an online provider of news, NPR will try ramping up 14 stations’ local reporting capacity through a project that creates and distributes web-original content in specialized subject areas that the stations want to develop.

The Argo Project, as the network calls it, will help the stations expand coverage by creating “content verticals,” a new-media term for an ongoing online offering devoted to a particular subject.

Think of Planet Money — the NPR.org feature that persistently examines the mysteries of the global economic meltdown. Imagine how Boston’s WBUR could apply that reporting depth and doggedness to health-care reform stories on its CommonHealth blog, or what Triple A pioneer WXPN could do on the Philadelphia music scene, or how Oregon Public Broadcasting could clarify environmental policy.

Read the whole story here.

It doesn’t seem that long ago since Radiohead did what was once unimaginable – release an album without being signed to a major record company. On the long march to digital ubiquity as the means of music delivery Radiohead avoided the tar pit that seems to be major label thinking and came out clear winners. Yes, they resorted later to releasing the album as a good old CD into regular retail distribution but they were pioneers and were soon followed with great success by Nine Inch Nails and to lesser success by many others. Both these bands had an understanding of what their fans wanted [price level choice, quality and special packaging] and both bands understood the power of the internet for marketing purposes and direct reach. [NB: Although I believe that the digital music file will rule the day, vinyl still has a role to play and I'll get to that later.]

The most interesting part of this experiment [which at the time, I would argue it was] was not only that it was wildly successful but it laid the groundwork for what I have coined the end of the organizing principle. In other words I suggest that we are now seeing the end of the album-length work as the permenant work, the everlasting body of work that represents the pinnacle of an artists’ creativity. I am fully expecting to hear the howls of derision over this but bear with me.

Radiohead

If you were honest how many albums do you own that demand to be listened to from beginning to end? AV Club recently came up with a list of 25, some of which I agree with and Rolling Stone, Spin and other mags regularly post their lists of the “all time greatest albums” whether its 100 or 50 or less. My band Gang Of Four’s album Entertainment! is often featured on these lists but take it from me it has its flaws. The problem with lists and suggestions is that they are all subjective. Being engaged by music requires too much of a personal commitment on an emotional level for anyone to be able to provide an ultimate list. [Imagine if an art critic attempted to make a top ten list of the world's greatest paintings. Why does popular music suffer from this conceit?]

We live in an era of MP3 players, streaming internet radio, web apps – not to mention the iTunes music application and its ability to shuffle your entire digital music collection – now the cloud and almost-mobile ubiquity, the list goes on; in what part of digital music culture does an album-length piece of work now reside?

I’ll answer that question – I believe it has no place in a digital future.

The original organizing principle of music was of course hand written, composed. It then moved along to sheet music and with that came revenue from sales to the musical public and by so doing helped to move revenue income beyond just ticket sales to the opera or orchestra performances. This wasn’t enough though. It was as if music was demanding to be organized and soon enough inventors jumped in to the fray and began organizing music recording and playback – at first on tin foil.

“From the earliest phonographs in 1877, courtesy of Mr. Thomas A. Edison, the cylinder was the preferred geometric form for a sound recording. The first records were made on strips of tinfoil, the predecessor of household aluminum foil, wrapped around a 4-inch diameter drum. The drum was hand-cranked at about 60 revolutions per minute (RPM) and the phonographic apparatus made sound impressions upon the foil. The expected lifetime of a foil recording was short because after a few playbacks the sound impressions were either worn down or the foil had ripped.” [Source: Tinfoil.com]

And then along came the wax cylinder which turned out to be too fragile for popular use. Music lovers had to wait until 1930 which was when RCA Victor launched the first commercially available vinyl long-playing record, marketed as “Program Transcription” discs. These revolutionary discs were designed for playback at 33⅓ rpm and pressed on a 30 cm diameter flexible plastic disc. [Source: Wikipedia]

Technically then, we can say that 1930 was the year that the organizing principle for the length of a popular music album was implemented, and with the advent of that organizing principle it is worth noting that musical artists had no control over the length of time their masterpiece would run; they were at the mercy of contemporary technology. Album length, roughly 35 minutes over two sides of vinyl, was simply a decision made by technologists who did not consult artists. [The gatefold sleeve containing double and triple albums became the norm later for rock bands with more to say - for better or worse.]

If musicians and bands were not part of this decision in the first place then why would they complain of what modern technology now brings – their craft has been unchained from early technological limitations and they now have endless amounts of time and bandwidth to spread their creative message far and wide; along with unfettered artistic control.

The Browser is The New iPod.

On March 24th I attended the Leadership Music Digital Summit in Nashville as a speaker. That morning I heard the keynote speech by Rio Caraeff, EVP eLABS at the Universal Music Group. The stand out phrase from him that resonated with me was “the browser is the new iPod.”

The Byrds – Photo Ed Caraeff

He spoke of lamenting the loss of the experiential and tactile nature of recorded music; he missed the tactile experience of music delivered in its vinyl and cardboard form [his father was the famous album sleeve art director, Ed Caraeff.] The digital file, he argued, had stripped the experience from the music; listening to music was now a flat and unemotional activity compared with holding a well-designed sleeve filled with images, lyrics and artwork. Because of this flat experience he predicted that there would be no future for selling recorded music directly to music fans.

He mentioned one area of success for Universal; the advent of the video game. An all-encompassing experiential medium that included more than just the games – the games came with a community of like-minded people and music. They also generate millions of dollars especially through the subscription fees that are required for online gaming activity.

Welcome to the Cloud

With his phrase ‘The browser is the new iPod’ Caraeff alludes to the ubiquitous access that we have to music. The browser is no longer limited to laptop or desktop computers – mobile devices have browsers too and in the case of the iPhone the music apps have been wildly successful. 4G promises to expand music delivery to mobile users even farther. Very soon there will be even less reason to ‘own’ music as it will be easily available at our fingertips everywhere. The cloud is the perfect place for storing your music collection. All of the above condemns the album to the trash can of history, it also suggest that online music subscription services may finally gain the upper hand.

So what are musicians to do?

First they must put nostalgia, tradition and the old business models and paradigms far behind them. They must, as Umair Haque argues with regard to any business – provide something of value. Haque also pushes the concept of ‘ideals’ – “because they are what ensure the value we are creating is authentic, deep, meaningful value — not just the shabby, threadbare illusion of value.” [Ideals were sorely lacking when the labels sold CDs full of filler for $18.99.]

Humans are subconsciously moved by the emotion of music, it provides a link to their ancestry and to their tribes, it stirs not only positive but sometimes negative feelings linked to moments in time and is often steeped in nostalgia and memories. No other art form is ‘consumed’ as broadly and passionately as music on a daily basis around the world.

How music was delivered used to be in the hands of the few – bands, concert promoters, record companies and their retail distribution companies, radio, and video shows such as MTV. In tech-speak this system embraced ‘push’ – we the mighty and powerful will “provide you” [at a price determined by "us"] with access to our treasures when “we” feel like it. These days that system is rapidly breaking down as music fans now ‘pull’ what “they” want to listen to.

Control has moved from the few to the millions of many. Dull labels and dull bands offering dull, flat, non-experiential product – e.g. a CD, will go the way of the CD as it goes the way of the Dodo. Consider what Cirque Du Soleil provides as an experience compared to Barnum and Bailey’s circus. Or Burning Man compared to your average music festival. Even the Las Vegas Beatles-themed show ‘Across The Universe’ wipes the floor with most rock concerts these days.

Music fans are no longer patiently waiting for their favorite bands to deliver new music according to the old customary cycle – album, press release, video, radio, tour. No, the fan base has to be regularly and consistently engaged. Some Ideas:

• First, communicate openly and ask your fans what they want from you
• Listen to what they have to say. Really listen
• Provide unique content such as early demos of new songs
• Never under estimate the power of a free MP3
• Forget completely the idea of an organizing principle. Invent a new one
• Use social media wisely. Twitter and Facebook Pages are best, MySpace is too cluttered
• Don’t push messages to your fans, have a two way interaction with them
• Invite them to share, join, support and build goodwill with you
• Scrap your web site and start a blog
• Remember to forget everything you know about the CD “business”
• Start to monetize the experience around your music
• Remember – the browser is the new iPod

And finally I leave you with one organizing principle that works as a tactile and experiential format and gives great pleasure – the vinyl album. Having said that I do not want to contradict any part of this article as I do not suggest using vinyl as a format for delivering an album-length piece of work. I do suggest using vinyl for the physical manifestation of your demos, out takes, live tracks etc, and always accompany it with a coupon for free download of any related digital product.

Related Links:

My Love of Vinyl Records
The End of the CD and CD Retailers
Puddlegum – Top 5 Reasons Why Vinyl Will Outlive CDs
David Byrne Tells The Record Labels to Embrace The MP3
How Killing the CD Single Killed the Recording Industry
How Bands Can Make More Money By Not Pricing Their Merchandize at Shows

Ok, this is a fascinating rant from Robert Scoble. His list of the newspaper industry’s woes, and in some cases unforgivable missteps, when presented like this could take your breath away. Yet all is not quite what it seems – e.g. the Huffington Post is a news aggregator and walks a fine line in repurposing other news outlets’ content. Google and Yahoo are search engines linking back to the newspaper’s sites etc, etc, but there is a point here – the newspaper industry [rather like the music industry] would have preferred that the internet would have just curled up and died – unfortunately it didn’t and it won’t….plan B anyone?

All the text below this line is from Scobleizer the blog:

The newspaper industry just gave away another free meal, er Twitter: do they have any left?
I’m listening to Dave Winer and Jay Rosen “reboot the news.” Jay is a journalism professor and Dave is a geek that helped either birth or bootstrap all sorts of publishing technologies including blogging, RSS, OPML, XML-RPC, and more. So, hearing the two of them do an audio podcast every Sunday is very interesting.

I’ve been pretending in my head that I’m a newspaper exec. When I do that I keep beating myself around the face. Why? Because the newspaper industry keeps giving the geeks free meals. Let’s study the free meals:

Free meal #1. Giving away classified advertising to Craig’s List.
Free meal #2. Giving away photography to Flickr (look at the photos from the Chinese Earthquake, why didn’t this happen on a newspaper branded site?).
Free meal #3. Giving away front page news to blogs like Huffington Post.
Free meal #4. Giving away “small” community news like births, deaths, birthdays, etc to Facebook.
Free meal #5. Giving away real-time news to Twitter.
Free meal #6. Giving away news distribution to Google News and Amazon Kindle, among others. With new sites like Kosmix coming on strong (hundreds of percent of growth month over month).
Free meal #7. Giving away restaurant reviews to Yelp.
Free meal #8. Giving away traffic information to Google Maps.
Free meal #9. Giving away celebrity news to Facebook and Twitter. (Why is Oprah on both of those, and why didn’t the newspaper industry lock up Oprah and keep her on a newspaper brand?)
Free meal #10. Giving away local news to Topix (at least that was funded by a newspaper brand).
Free meal #11. Giving away business news to Yahoo Finance and Google Finance (and something new that will get announced tomorrow).
Free meal #12. Giving away news ranking to Memeorandum.
Free meal #13. Giving away astrology to Astrology.com.
Free meal #14. Giving away comics to Comics.com.

What is their latest giveaway? Crowd-sourced news. I visit Twitter Search every day to find out what is “hot news.” That’s something I used to look at newspapers and older media for (radio, TV) but Twitter is just plain better at telling me what is trending.

OK, so now my face is bloody because I’m seeing all the things the newspaper industry gave away. Do they have anything left to give away?

YES!

Read the rest of this very lengthy post here….

The folks at Life have realized that their strength is not just in all of the photos they have at hand but in their curatorial skills. As this beta site shows, they have the content and it is no doubt rich and deep. So many pictures and categories – you could spend days in here. And of course they own a superb url..

Here’s an excerpt from their About page:

Welcome to LIFE.com, the largest, most amazing collection of professional photography on the Web.

LIFE and Getty Images, the two most recognized names in photography, have joined forces to provide you instant access to millions of breathtaking photographs — for free. LIFE.com not only lets you wander through the legendary LIFE and Getty archives, but with more than 3,000 new photos added every day, it also gives you the best pictures of the people and places shaping our world now.

Slagsmålsklubben – Sponsored by destiny from Tomas Nilsson on Vimeo.

Simon Hoegsberg’s latest image is 100 meters long. There are 178 people in the image that was shot over 20 days from the same spot on a railroad bridge on Warschauer Strasse in Berlin during the summer of 2007. It is fascinating. Look for the two people who both have bandages over one eye – weird. Here’s the link. Mouse over the slide to make it move from left to right.

Found on Twitter from bjmin

From Travelution.co.uk found on Twitter from @alisamleo

What happened when a blogger decided to take on Ryanair

February 23, 2009

Here is an amazing tale from late last week, when an Irish freelance web designer/developer, Jason Roe [and Twitter], found himself involved in a extremely strange tête-à-tête with everyone’s, er, favourite low cost carrier, Ryanair.

It all started when Roe wrote a blog post about how he’d discovered a usability error in ryanair.com booking process.

In short, he says he found a bug in the system which allowed users to obtain a 0.00 charge for their flights.

There was some disagreement in the comments section as to whether it worked at the time. Roe claims it does.

Nevertheless, some people at Ryanair HQ decided to chip in. The comments are not what one would expect of a large company that has decided to engage with social media, to say the least.

This is just one of many from a succession of commenters under the ‘Ryanair staff…’ tag on the same post.

Crikey.

[NB: We have seen the IP addresses of the commenters and they all trace back to Ryanair HQ]

So, most people would say that the best method for dealing with a provocative post like Roe’s is to be measured and calm.

But then again, Ryanair – lest we forget – doesn’t exactly play by the same rules as others when it comes to dealing with customers, complaints, partners, etc.

[Read the full post - and it really is worth reading all the comments from Ryanair...]

Post by Kevin May on February 23, 2009 04:33PM
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Image from Blog of Mr Tweet.

Recently on the blog known as MrTweet a question was posed – “How are you using Facebook, Linkedin and Twitter differently?”

If I had been asked I would have responded as follows: Those three networking platforms can be grouped into a historical context – Facebook past, Linkedin future/present, and Twitter future.

Facebook is the past. I have been a member of Facebook for what seems like an eternity but in fact it has been a little under two years. I have 1,472 “friends” as of writing and it’s fair to say that I only know about 15% of these “friends” very well. As a minor music celebrity I have attracted a lot of musicians, bands and labels. As Director, Insights & Digital Media at Nemo and as someone who speaks regularly at conferences on social media as well as online music issues, I have attracted those cohorts too. Just this past week my sister and brother who still reside in the UK joined Facebook and brought along with them various nephews, nieces, cousins, aunts and uncles. I now have no excuse for not being in touch with my family more regularly – technology shortens the distance between us. On Facebook that is not necessarily a good thing.

The author centre, tagged in a picture from the early 80’s

Facebook is historical white noise to me. I am constantly tagged in pictures and videos and more often than not in an unflattering light. There I am at a wedding in 1987 clearly drunk, and there I am in some unnamed establishment sitting next to some old girlfriend who is probably mortified to see that photo in such a public forum after all these years. [Insert landscape and memory essay here.] I have spent many hours un-tagging myself in photos and videos just to have someone tag them right back after I’ve moved along. One day soon I fully expect to find a video of myself dancing naked on a table at a party. And that’s what is wrong with Facebook for me; the complete lack of control of message, my message.

Facebook really is for college students who want to catalogue images and videos of their crazy drunken selves for all the world to see; images they will live to regret when applying for a job. Closing your account is the only means of control on FB.

For the more mature types on Facebook [apparently there has been a surge of new members in the 40+ demographic] there is the shock of discovering that all those folks in high school or college -the ones that you had left behind and wiped from memory – are now waiting in your email inbox as “friend” requests. There was of course a reason for leaving all that behind. I could go on. Clearly Facebook is best left to the young who actually seem to enjoy being stalked across social networks.

Linkedin is Future/Present. Linkedin I term as future/present because I use it to store current details about my career activities [present]. I have built a decent network of like-minded business people with whom I can share job opportunities and details of event activities and/or my role within Nemo [future client work.] There are useful forums where I can post a topical question and via the crowdsourcing effect of Linkedin I often receive a lot of very intelligent answers [I wouldn't try this on Facebook for e.g.]

Linkedin is a dry world whereas Facebook is a week at the beach in Mexico during Spring Break. Linkedin is quiet time in the study where you get things done. It really is all business.

This brings me to Twitter. Although millions of users are on the Twitter platform its audience is in the low millions compared to FB and LI. Many of my peers who open a Twitter account leave me a message soon after joining that invariably includes the phrase “I don’t get it…” Fair enough, but hey everyone what is it you want to get? If you want to have a tool that is the perfect blend of Facebook [without Spring Break] and Linkedin [without retiring to the study] then Twitter is for you.

Twitter put simply is micro-blogging. Used wisely Twitter gives your followers a real-time window into your social, business and working world down to the minute. Use it unwisely you will find yourself in a lonely corner of Twitter twittering to yourself with a dunces hat on. I put Twitter in the future column even though other social media types put it in the present because I believe that when it is used purposefully it has a transcendental power and therefore we will see it being used much more widely in future.

And by purposefully I mean by intent which then leads to a question – what are your goals when using social media? Remember, we have to put technology to one side, this is not about technology it is about doing something that comes very naturally to all human beings [sociopaths excepted,] – it’s called socializing. Technology has shortened the distance between us but it hasn’t changed why we socialize. It is worth noting that Twitter is arguably more successful than any other social network platform for helping to get offline groups organized around conferences and such – they are known as Tweetups. And for e.g., I know of someone tweeting upon arrival at PDX airport asking for a ride downtown who within minutes was picked up and given a ride from a fellow tweeter – Twitter can be that hyper-local.

On a grander global and political scale, Wikipedia notes: Twitter has been used as a “social justice tool” to connect groups of people in critical situations. On April 10 2008, James Buck, a graduate journalism student at UC Berkeley, and his translator, Mohammed Maree, were arrested in Egypt for photographing an anti-government protest. On his way to the police station Buck used his mobile phone to send the message “Arrested” to his 48 “followers” on Twitter. Those followers contacted UC Berkeley, the US Embassy in Cairo, and a number of press organizations on his behalf. Buck was able to send updates about his condition to his “followers” while being detained. He was released the next day from the Mahalla jail after the college hired a lawyer for him.

Should you be arrested or simply lost just remember Twitter is always at your fingertips – text 40404.

So what’s different about Twitter vs Facebook?

Here’s an answer to that question based on my own use – I see Facebook as a vessel that contains your past – landscape and memory again. FB informs you of your friends’ activities via your email inbox when they change their status. One then links back to FB [unless you happen to always be on your FB account constantly refreshing your browser window,] logs in and reads the status or message. In other words many actions are required to keep in touch with your friends. On the other hand Twitter is a constant feed of information from those that you have chosen to follow. There is an important distinction here – on FB I choose to accept a “friend request” and your request is at the mercy of my keystroke, yes or no? If I key yes then we are “friends” and in my case that decision is made on a whim – I may or may not know you but we’ll see how it goes [sounds like a one night stand in college, right?]

The author tweets

With Twitter “friending” permission is not required – you can follow me if you like, I can follow you if I like. The decision to be or remain followed or un-followed is out of my hands or your hands. The content of our messages or tweets is all that makes us worthy [Think dunce Twittering in the corner..] and Twitter restricts those Tweets to 140 characters. And best of all, if I don’t check in for a day or two I miss the conversation and that’s fine – I am not obliged to be responding to some request ala FB. Nor do I get poked or bitten by a vampire and no one sends me Valentine bear requests. I mean, c’mon!

Twitter profiles are simple too. They consist of 160 character bios and links to the person’s web site. Twitter protocol suggests that having an avatar is more pro than not having one and being anonymous on Twitter creates suspicion.

Twitter has some user practices that are carefully followed unlike other social networking platforms. There is an etiquette in place that may have provided an atmosphere of decorum in what looks at first blush like a frenzied space. Here are some Twitter basics:

If you tweet using a company name, i.e @NemoHQ, don’t tweet only about Nemo – you have an obligation to tweet informative posts that have nothing to do with your company. You should share the sharing. You will gain more respect from your followers that way. Also your tweets will not be considered spam.

To reply to a Tweet that you like just reply to the persons address e.g. @pampelmoose This can keep the conversation moving as other people can look up that users profile to find the thread.

Re-Tweeting – Add the letters RT to the front of the original tweeter’s address and include the original message. For e.g. if it was a message from me that you are RT’ing you would put RT: @pampelmoose Again this keeps a conversation moving. By Re-Tweeting you are getting the conversation in front of your followers and they in turn can RT to their followers creating an exponential audience.

If you want to contact someone directly through Twitter you can Direct Message them as long as they are following you. At Twitter.com you add D in front of the username to message people directly – D @pampelmoose

When someone follows you on Twitter it is good practice to DM them and say thanks for the follow.

It’s ok to ask your followers to spread the word for you by re-tweeting. If they like your tweet content they will, if they don’t they won’t.

By using the # sign you can create search terms that other users can access. For example if I were to write about Nemo I would type #NemoHQ then users can click through to all of the conversations on Twitter that include #NemoHQ You can also monitor what the most popular conversations are by using the Twitter search link.

I recommend reading Guy Kawasaki’s blog as he has great insights into using social network platforms wisely including Twitter.

As this post was inspired by Mr Tweet’s questions we can now come full circle back to his blog and two comments on this subject that he highlighted:

Featured Comment by Heather Rasley

They’re vastly different platforms with vastly different goals. Here’s how I use each:

Facebook: Have been on it since undergrad, and have a large network. It was once more important to me, but now I don’t check in too often and don’t take it seriously.

Sometimes I’ll have wall exchanges with friends, which are almost exclusively based on inside jokes. Status updates are rarely related to anything I’m actually doing. I’ll add someone new when I meet them, if only to feel more “connected.”

Sometimes I’ll send messages to folks I don’t have other contact info for. It’s great for rekindling old/lost connections. I don’t share anything there (or anywhere) that I would be ashamed of.

LinkedIn: Purely professional, and not used often. Very rarely send messages or take part in other social activity, aside from adding new coworkers / associates / friends to my network and replying to any requests sent to me. Any actions I take there are explicitly toward the end of building my professional persona / furthering my career. To me, it feels cold. Interactions there typically aren’t very rich.

Twitter: Used for a blend of personal/social and professional use. I’m highly aware of the public and repostable nature of my tweets.

Content posted varies from where I am at the moment, to work-related links, to tweets about personal projects, to quotes and other links that I personally enjoy. I like it because it’s malleable.

I think people tend to understand that what they’re seeing is a glimpse of me as an entire person. @s and DMs are effective for quick, asynchronous communication between acquaintances.

I’ve met lots of new people in the real world through Twitter (”Oh, you like that, too? Let’s meet.” “Oh, you’re there, too? Let’s meet.”)

Featured Comment By Dean Kakridas

Here is how I currently utlize the ‘Big 3′:

Facebook: ‘rekindling and repurposing the past’.

Primarily used with close friends, family and colleagues I interface or have interfaced with in the physical world.

Twitter: ‘present day by day social stimulus for personal and professional betterment.’

Here, I am actively looking for key inputs to drive my lifestyle design while reciprocating the same with friends and followers.

LinkedIn: ‘all about future interactions with people and parts unknown‘.

This is the shiny and professional looking profile that stays consistent and concrete–hopefully a buoy and beacon for perpetual professional good standing and hope for financial prosperity.

So past, present and future aspects of my life are well served by these three bastions of digital social connectedness.

Although Twitter has been around since March 2006 it has recently erupted in popularity and is covered in the media almost daily. In other words Twitter has become the buzz word du jour and with that comes scorn and derision as well as support. Those that don’t get it dismiss it is a gimmick, and those that do, use it as a very useful business tool.

The social media arena is fast-moving and ever-evolving but the one constant is people. Without people there is no such thing as social media. As the Philippines-based web site Mindanao Examiner points out: …social media today is a pure mess: it has become a collection of countless features, tools, and applications fighting for a piece of the pie. and goes on to say We’re moving away from “users,” “customers,” and “shoppers”: social media is bringing back the human element to all digital interaction. People now deliberately seek meaningful connection, self-expression, and a relevant and receptive community.

That sounds a lot like Twitter to me.

Here’s a few stories I found on Twitter about Twitter in the media on February 21 2009:

Politico – Conversion of a Twitter Skeptic
The Oregonian – Portland Twitter’s the Oscars
Forbes – Travel Portland Creates Nation’s first Twisitor Center
COED Magazine – 406 Bands Who Twitter
Guy Kawasaki – How To Get ReTweeted
San Francisco Examiner – Twitter Helps You Make Friends With Shaq
Idaho Statesman – Visit Idaho Now on Twitter
The Orlando Sentinel – Twitter and NASCAR Go Together Like Kyle Busch and Auto Club Speedway
San Francisco Chronicle – Mayor Gavin Newsom has a Twitter Account

Follow Me:

Facebook
Twitter
Linkedin
Nemo
Pampelmoose
Social Cache

More essays from Dave Allen – Thoughts On Social Media

From MediaPost:

In the hyper-targeted media world, the sweet spot is often local. To tap that potential, NBC Local Media has launched Neighborhood News Pages, available in nine O&O markets, including seven in the top 10. The sites, which aggregate news from NBC’s local TV affiliates as well as the Web, then organize the information by neighborhood. Topics covered include news, sports, health, around town, weather and traffic.

The local markets represented are: WNBC New York, KNBC Los Angeles, WMAQ Chicago, WCAU Philadelphia, KNTV San Francisco, KXAS Dallas-Ft. Worth, WRC Washington, D.C., KNDS San Diego and KTIS Hartford. The news pages were built and launched by Outside.in, a data and technology platform that creates and distributes hyperlocal news.

“Our new Locals Only sites enable our users to be true insiders and to fulfill on that promise we need to deepen our coverage in local communities,” says Brian Buchwald, senior vice president, local integrated media for NBC. He notes that the NNP allows the network to “add entirely new sections of content to our sites and create more targeted ad impressions at a fraction of the cost.”

“Publishers can use our Neighborhood News Pages to create thousands of discrete, highly targeted local news pages to complement their national and regional coverage,” adds Mark Josephson, CEO of Outside.in. “Outside.in covers all local blogs, mainstream media and twitter streams. If it’s about local, we’ve got it.”

Both national and local ads appear on Neighborhood News Pages. The owned-and-operated sales team sells ads for the sites, in addition to NBC’s national sales team.

Seriously, how is this not dreck? Can the folks at Magpie not understand that the minute any of my followers on Twitter spam me with Magpie I will simply unfollow them? Which, on second thoughts, means that I would then have a filtered list of folks to follow who understand that spamming your followers is uncool….

The folks at Magpie may also want to consider the folklore of the winged version, it is not considered a benign bird:

Folklore

In Britain and Ireland, there are a number of superstitions regarding magpies
A single magpie is associated with bad luck
One should make sure to greet magpies when they are encountered in order to either allay bad luck or encourage good luck as related to the number of birds and therefore their place in the Magpie poem. Common greetings include “Hello Mr Magpie” “How is your wife/where is your wife?”, “Good Morning/Evening Sir” and other marks of respect.
Upon seeing a lone magpie one should repeat the words “I defy thee” seven times.
On seeing a lone magpie one should pinch the person they are walking with, if they are alone they are to pinch themselves.
If a lone Magpie is seen, one should salute it to show you respect it. This formality can be forgone if the Magpie looks directly in your eyes, which shows it respects you

Nemo recently completely overhauled the web site for Oregon’s historic Timberline Lodge and Wordpress.org featured the site as a showcase. Go Team Nemo or is that Meat Omen?

The idea of creating a full time position for social media Community Managers is gaining pace. Any executive that is resisting the idea of expanding their company’s brand awareness via social media should take time to read Amber Naslund’s post on landing the Community Manager position at Radian6

“Today, I officially accepted the opportunity to join my long-time client, Radian6, full time as their Director of Community. You’ve heard me say that I’m all about figuring out in nitty-gritty terms how all this social media stuff applies in a business context, and now I’m going to experience that first hand. I was honored that the team at Radian6 thought enough of me that they wanted me as a more permanent part of their team.”

Read the rest of Amber’s post here.

Found on Read Write Web.

Twitter as a social media phenomenon has many people baffled. It simply doesn’t make sense and that’s mainly because most people who decry it don’t understand its considerable potential. One good place for Twitter neophytes to begin would be with Guy Kawasaki’s blog post, How To Use Twitter As A Tool.

Click image to find out

As a tool Twitter has many uses. For instance, one enterprising young woman used Twitter to get a job – “Looking for a new job, Alexa Scordato didn’t email or call her contacts about possible openings. Instead, she messaged them via the social-networking Web site Twitter.com. Her brief message: “Hey there! Looking for a Social Media job up in Boston. Are you guys doing any entry level hires?” Within a week, she had an interview. Within two weeks, she had a job.” But be careful about what you post [or tweet as they say..] to Twitter.

“I would rather see someone who posts good-quality information than what they had for lunch,” said Lindsay Olson, who uses Twitter to recruit for Paradigm Staffing, a staffing agency that focuses on public relations and marketing.” Read the Wall St Journal story here.

And if you have already embraced PR 2.0 at your company then you can discover and follow media people on Twitter here.

Before you know it you’ll be impressing friends and colleagues by your knowledge of TweetDeck.. Follow me on Twitter to see how I use services such as FriendFeed and Tumblr to make using Twitter even easier.

Maybe everyone in the Northwest and the Northeast are snowed in and have nothing better to do but my Twitter Counter Stats are on the up. Check your own here. Follow me on Twitter here.

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.

Lois Whitman. Pic via TechCrunch

It’s amazing how some things never change. This article from Michael Arrington at TechCrunch is bouncing around Twitter and it concerns one Lois Whitman. In fact the article is headlined – Meet Lois Whitman, The Poster Child For Everything Wrong With PR. Apparently Lois works for HWH, a PR firm and she’s been pissing off some people. Consider this from Michael – “Lois is one of the most obnoxious PR people you’ll ever meet, and the poster child for everything that is wrong with the industry.” and this – “Lois takes pleasure in making people miserable, and her specialty is spamming.” It’s a fun read..it proves that some institutions have not embraced the idea of two-way communications at all. Or it only proves that Lois and her ilk are heading the way of the dinosaurs.

As Michael says regarding HWH’s client list – “You are supposed to hire these people because they have relationships with the media, not because they know how to effectively spam and are verbally abusive.”

Found on Twitter from @Julie Ma.

No, really? Just a quickie:

You can ‘friend’ Tide on Facebook

As for P.& G, the company permits Facebook to talk about the results of only a single P.& G. promotion, presumably its most successful to date: for Crest Whitestrips. The promotion began in fall 2006, when P.& G. invited Facebook members in 20 college campus networks to become Crest Whitestrips “fans” on the product’s Facebook Page. Facebook said it was a great success, attracting 14,000 fans.

One could argue, however, that with the additional enticements that Crest provided — thousands of free movie screenings, as well as sponsored Def Jam concerts — a brand of hemorrhoid cream could have attracted a similar number of nominal “fans.”

Read the article here, unless you feel it’s ok to ‘friend’ a detergent, or Spraychel..

The Head of Digital at P&G doesn’t think it works either..

Pic: Adweek

Over at Adweek, Brian Morrissey makes a very strong argument that Facebook advertiser applications are finding very few takers. His overview entitled Apps: The Newest Brand Graveyard, lists four brands with Facebook Apps that are struggling to find users – Fed Ex [1,500 users,] Ford [106 users,] Nike [3,400 users,] and Microsoft [8,500 users.]

For anyone who believes that marketing through social media will work for the brand and/or provide a revenue stream for Facebook this article is worth reading. Here’s an extract -

‘Brands, in general, have found Facebook unforgiving terrain for marketing. It’s well known, for instance, that banner ads perform poorly on the site. (A recent IDC report called advertising on social networks “stillborn.”) But the Facebook Platform, launched 18 months ago — which lets developers create social applications for users — was thought to offer the perfect opportunity to move beyond banners to provide “branded utility.” So far, however, Facebook apps from brands like Coca-Cola, Champion, Ford and Microsoft are as popular as desolate Second Life islands.’

Just last month I posted how P&G’s Head of Digital, Ted McConnell isn’t a believer.

Here’s a thought… Saturday Night Live viewers surely must consist of a few Becks beer drinkers. Maybe Darius the blogger could take a cue from the show [start by watching it Darius] and notice how successful SNL and NBC have been about getting cool content online really fast…, no blog required, just great, great content. Becks I give you J**z In My Pants from SNL:

I love nothing better on Monday morning than reading Adrants – coffee –> Adrants –> laugh at the fails…no one does it better. Today they cheered me up with their usual sarcastic takedown of a company starting a blog and getting it wrong. I can’t believe that it is almost 2009 and companies are still struggling with the simple idea of how to communicate intelligently with their customers via a two-way communication. It’s not difficult guys… Seriously, some of the quips in this Adrants rap on Becks Beer, Becks Launches a Blog. Gets Everything Wrong, should make me cry not laugh. Check it – some extracts:

Beck’s has launched a blog, Different by Choice. Yawn, right? But the way they’ve announced it and the way it’s formatted is so annoying, it can’t be left alone.

In an email beginning with “Hello Important Marketing Blog People,” Beck’s blogger Darius asks, “has anyone told you recently how hot you are?” and then goes on to explain how he “destroyed” 850 other potential bloggers vying for the job “‘cos that is the way I roll.” Ugh. Cue the Agency.com Subway video.

And then with an ego akin to Sean John believing anyone remotely takes him seriously, Darius prattles on, “This is a novel and let’s face it a brave choice by Beck’s to give me a platform to extol my views and ideals on their global website whilst writing on all that I deem to be ‘Different by Choice.’ Beck’s legal department are bracing themselves for the impending months.”

Ooo. Blogger VS. Lawyer! Hey Darius, that one was played out in 2002.

And if all this weren’t enough to make you want to gag yourself with I AM KING, the entire blog site is in Flash. Yes, a blog in Flash, the worst platform to create anything which requires even the tiniest bit of navigation.

OMG!

My friend Jonathan Spalter, chairman of the Mobile Future Coalition and CEO of Public Insight, served as chief information officer at the United States Information Agency during the Clinton administration and has written an insightful op-ed piece for the San Jose Mercury News about Obama and that BlackBerry that may have to go to the tech bins at Goodwill.

“As President-elect Barack Obama prepares to take power, sadly one of his first acts as president may be to power down his beloved BlackBerry smart-phone. Why must the leader of the country that created the Internet, e-mail and various other advancements, be forced to forgo modern technology?
The primary concern cited is the Presidential Records Act, which requires all presidential documents to be put in the official record. This is a worthy goal to be sure, and Obama, who was widely acknowledged as one of the most technologically savvy candidates during the campaign, has been an advocate for governmental accountability, transparency, accessibility and efficiency. Still, the strictures of this act should not deprive our president — or our nation — of the benefits of his BlackBerry, to which he has been joined at the hip.

While the president is required to furnish to the national archives logs of telephone calls, and copies of all correspondence and papers, electronic and otherwise, our nation’s archivists have no need for concern that smart-phones can circumvent these rules. BlackBerry One would be fully compliant, as all phone logs and text and e-mail messages can easily be saved on government servers.

Discretion required

The trickier issue has to do with the security of the president’s cell phone. Hackers have listened in on cell phone conversations and downloaded smart-phone data. For situations when the president needs to discuss sensitive or classified matters, mobile and wireless engineers and the U.S. intelligence agencies have designed and deployed ingenious encryption algorithms for use on dedicated mobile platforms for his use. When it comes to his everyday use of his personal smart-phone though, the president, like the rest of us, simply will need to exercise good judgment and discretion about what he says and what he sends.

Obama’s effective use of technology platforms like the smart-phone is important for other reasons. He plays a vital role as a champion of progress and innovation. What signal would it send to international technology markets, and our own citizens, that the U.S. president is “off the grid?” The Pew Internet and American Life Project recently established that Hispanics and African-Americans are driving data usage on mobile phones and using wireless handsets as portable personal computers. It is ironic that Obama would promote policies increasing access to mobile technologies, but personally would be restricted in their use.

YouTube president

This is not the first time that our nation’s presidents have had to contend with an often technophobic culture in the federal government. In 1877, President Rutherford B. Hayes, despite strong misgivings from the White House telegraph office, installed the first telephone. The Clinton White House prevailed in a debate with the State Department allowing him to e-mail birthday greetings to the president of South Korea, rather than using snail mail.

President-elect Obama’s team has already initiated a march to technological progress — his weekly “radio” addresses to Americans have also broadcast on YouTube. Obama will also be the first president with a laptop on his Oval Office desk. By firmly embracing technologies like the smart-phone to engage people around the world, more efficiently manage his administration, and even occasionally check Chicago White Sox box scores, Obama will advocate a new era of transparency and innovation in American governance.”

DataPortability – Join The Conversation from Smashcut on Vimeo.

Found on thewebissocial.com

Alisa Leonard-Hansen over at her blog, Socialized, rips apart very concisely, the new campaign from JC Penny called “Beware of The DogHouse.” She does it so well. A missed opportunity exposed in all its gory beauty. [In the Doghouse is a viral marketing campaign that allows women to put their significant other in the "Doghouse" for bad gift choices this holiday season.] Ach!!

Excerpt from Alisa’s post – Not only is the premise of the campaign utterly ridiculous and condescending–but at its center is what else…a microsite! A microsite, oh why didn’t we think of that before?! Ah, but wait, it gets better. They implemented Facebook Connect. Now, you’d think I’d be pretty excited about it as I’ve been covering FBC since it was first announced back in May of this year…ah, but marketers never fail me. So did they do something useful with the FBC implementation? No! They created this lame microsite and a game by which chicks can put their dudes in a doghouse and do so via Facebook Connect. So, you chose to use FBC to let girls pick Facebook friends/bf’s into some lame doghouse? Because that is super useful and makes much more sense than say, integrating FBC into the JC Penney online shopping experience and thereby including friend data (purchases, wishlists, etc) into the product merchandising model. No, that just makes too much sense. We’ll just stick with this awesome Doghouse thing…sweet!

In yet another social media debacle, the VP of Marketing at McNeil Consumer Healthcare, the folks who bring us Motrin, has posted an apology on the company’s web site. After offending millions of moms who carry their babies in those wrap around shawls, McNeil was flayed by a firestorm of criticism from the mom bloggers of the world who Twittered McNeil into submission. McNeil made a cardinal error – they failed to research the very market, new moms, that they were trying to reach and then doubled down and took the weekend off without monitoring the firestorm that was merely smoldering before it erupted. Result – egg on the face and a no doubt expensive ad campaign in the trash can….. Here’s the offending ad –

Simple user interface, giant database of videos, easy search that works…and all built on the back of free content handed to them by the recording industry. Ha!

MTV Music

This is a beta version of the trailer for Spooky’s Birth of a Nation re-work

I spent last week traveling coast to coast with a stop at the SanFran MusicTech Summit as a panelist, a visit to Venables Bell to make a social media presentation, then on to NYC to speak on a panel at the CMJ Music Conference. Both panels covered social media but the audiences in SF and NYC were wildy disparate – music technologists at one and college students and musicians at the other. I intend to follow up this post with one about the SF visits but first I wanted to write about my fellow panelist at CMJ, the artist Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky.

Paul D. Miller is an artist who embraces the current fractured cultural landscape with abandon. A DJ by nature he is used to mashing, mixing, beat-colliding, deconstructing and rebuilding. He resists the idea of boundaries, everything in his world can be re-booted, shaped and formed anew. He is multi-disciplined and multi-genre. As a musician he regularly tours the world giving away thousands of copies of his CD remixes as he goes. He’s a writer whose latest book, ‘Sound Unbound – Sampling Digital Music and Culture‘, is a collection of essays from the likes of Steve Reich, Bruce Sterling and Simon Reynolds; it is of course accompanied by a free CD of avante-garde music.

DJ Spooky(l) and Dave Allen(r) at CMJ Oct 08

His latest work is “Rebirth of a Nation” – remix of D.W. Griffith’s 1915 film “Birth of a Nation.” – literally a movie mashup that Miller has ‘remixed’ and re-purposed into a 21st century take of that classic movie by adding contemporary clips of social unrest and cultural upheaval seen through Miller’s particularly modern lens.

Miller describes in his own words the process of his work:

“Like an acrobat drifting through the topologies of codes, glyphs and signs that make up the fabric of my everyday life, I like to flip things around. With a culture based on stuff like Emergency Broadcast Network hyper edited new briefs, Ninja Tune dance moguls Cold Cut’s “7 Minutes of Madness” remix of Eric B and Rakim’s “Paid in Full” to Grandmaster Flash’s “Adventures on the Wheels of Steel” to later excursions into geographic, cultural, and temporal dispersion like MP3lit.com – contemporary 21st Century aesthetics needs to focus on how to cope with the immersion we experience on a daily level – a density that Sergei Eisenstein back in 1929 spoke of when he was asked about travel and film:“the hieroglyphic language of the cinema is capable of expressing any concept, any idea of class, any political or tactical slogan, without recourse to the help of suspect dramatic or psychological past” Does this mean that we make our own films as we live them? Travelling without moving. It’s something even Aristotle’s “Unmoved Mover” wouldn’t have thought possible. But hey, like I always say, “who’s counting?””

Miller is a 21st century digital/analog mash up artist. He soaks up culture and remixes and re-purposes it every day. Nothing is sacred, everything is up for grabs. His work belies the efforts of those who embrace online social networking as something “new” brought to us by “new” technological tools. Miller’s work is an antidote to that wrong-headed thinking. In a world that is populated by digital youth there are already hundreds if not thousands of younger versions of Miller creating mashed up works every day. Their numbers grow daily.

Before the end of this decade these young artists will constitute a digital tsunami that will sweep aside current social media and social networking conceits.

Uupdate: Here’s a link to the site for RIP: A Remix Manifesto, where Web activist and filmmaker Brett Gaylor explores issues of copyright in the information age, mashing up the media landscape of the 20th century and shattering the wall between users and producers.

In a recent post entitled ‘The Biggest Irony on the Internet,’ Ethan Bauley attempts to draw a line between Social Media on one side and Mass, or Traditional Media on the other. His argument is simply put; if there is a true arena that we insist on calling Social Media then clearly there is its opposite – Mass Media, Traditional Media etc, or Old School Media as I like to call it.

I liked the idea of defining the parameters but not the Google-bait moniker he had come up with to describe it – Industrial Media. [Industrial Media makes me think of heavy industries such as ship building or ordinance factories although it is true that mechanical devices are required to deliver most of old media...] I left a lengthy comment on his post. Here’s an extract – the animal references are a result of another fine post that Ethan referred to on a similar subject entitled ‘Dogs and Birds Can Make Social Media, You Can Too‘ by Bryan Landers.

…..so, when we consider Twitter or FaceBook as “social media” we miss the point. They are just tools that users think have a ’soul’ but there is no there, there, to coin a phrase. We are not connected at all – no dog pee, no ant colony eusocial structure, no bee hives – just blather, photos and updates at the base level.

Social Media vs Industrial Media seems a weak argument to me and just serves to muddy the waters more. Drop the term Social Media altogether and then we can just go back to broadcast, traditional or mass media on the industry side – it’s worked for long enough why change it now? As for what we are all up to online on social sites I would say that arguably we are not connecting the dots – we are sending technological semaphore signals that are being misunderstood, misread or mangled in an attempt to find the results we are expecting. Unfortunately those results will always leave us wanting. Throw a party, go to a concert, commune with your inner animal to remind yourself what socializing really means….or just follow a dog around its neighborhood and see how many times it stops to pee.

Here’s Ethan’s reply – “Ultimately, trying to define “social media” or “industrial media” isn’t really the game I hope to play, and I should be more transparent about that. In fact I think that pursuing a definition as an outcome of this discussion is tantamount to trying to “decide” whether or not In A Silent Way is “jazz.”

My goal instead is to share a little insight about what I’ve learned from books like TWoN, get some feedback on my thoughts, and help others and myself make better business decisions through an understanding of information economics (production, distribution, and consumption). Reading and thinking about comments like yours, I’m feeling pretty good about that goal.

In general, I find it a lot easier and more fun to design businesses and marketing plans while pursuing a systematic study of the economic differences between dog pee, Usenet, cable TV, et al. To that end, you might love Brian Haven’s piece from last week, All Media Is Social, which is kind of the happy medium between Benkler and your comment.”

Ethan is right, I do like Brian Haven’s post ‘All Media Is Social.’ He at least considers Nature.

When we wrongly consider technology as a ‘new’ medium that simply and efficiently transformed culture, business and society, we forget our own human ancestry. We leave out Nature. In our hearts we want to belong, to share; we fear dying alone and as we age we become thanatophobic – we fear dying. Individuality is an illusion. [By that I don't mean an individual's style, taste, fashion etc, things that set us apart aesthetically from others, I mean we are forever bound to being social animals.]

Here’s an extract from an essay of mine called ‘On Social Media, Blogs and Advertising:

“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.”

As for marketers who wish to advertise on social networking sites, they must first consider our everyday lives before they consider our online ‘personas,’ – the ones we all make up as we fill out our profiles on social network sites. We are far more complicated than those shadowy online personalities suggest. Marketers wishing to reach the millions of people in social network sites face the same conundrum that pollsters face during a general election – if a Republican candidate for office were to ask a registered Republican which way she will vote he will get the answer she thinks he wants to hear – “for you of course.” But behind the secrecy of the ballot box curtains she will vote the way her heart tells her. In my online profile I may lie about my age, my sex and my race, my income level, my home town, my likes and my dislikes and more.

But, am I really lying? Maybe I am just reinventing myself for the digital age – giving people the information they think they want which can easily be shared with other people who also think they want it. Good luck marketing to me.

Business Week has posted a slide show offering up its list of the 25 Most Influential People on The Web and it’s a pretty good list too. Of course, any list that includes Jon Stewart and The Daily Show, which has become the place where many claim to be getting their best coverage of the elections, would get my vote….

I have a friend who is studying journalism at a decent university. Before she started the course and took on the financial burden it would entail she had asked me for my opinion about the value of having a journalism degree versus just diving in and finding a job as a writer. Tricky question.

Here we are in 2008 where ‘citizen journalists‘ abound and they are here to stay as Wikipedia shows. Although getting a good degree is a worthwhile endeavor my gut tells me that my friend should be writing; every day, everywhere. A degree in journalism may no longer be the prerequisite to being gainfully employed.

As more businesses begin to embrace radical transparency (as they should) then new job positions are opening up that do not follow the old tried [tired?] and tested methods of ‘corporate communications.’ In the new world of PR/Communications I suggest that the following list of abilities/talents would be a very large part of the job description. See how you score:

01. Do you have a personal blog or website? [ Yes? - good. 10 points. No? - start one.]
02. Are you an influencer? [Do your peers look to you for advice and insight into how people are snapping up the latest gadgets and are immersing themselves in music, fashion and technology? Do they ask you what your opinion is before they make a decision themselves?] 10 points.
03. Are you a trusted source? [Do people trust your opinions on subjects in your area of expertize? For instance, if you are a devout environmentalist do you think the Toyota Prius is a boon or a bust? Explain.] 10 points.
04. Are you a thought leader? [Do you contribute articles and essays that outline your thinking on subjects that you are well versed in? Do people care?] 10 points.
05. Are you a filter? [Do you carefully distill content, media and messages into relevant posts for your readers?] 10 points.
06. You are, of course, well versed in the art of Google Alerts, right?
[No? deduct 10 points.]
07. You use Twitter, FaceBook, Tumblr, FriendFeed, Flickr, MyVidoop, LinkedIn, Twellow, Ma.gnolia and faithfully follow Daily Candy, BuzzNet, Idolater and Perez Hilton. [Good. Award yourself any number of points.]
08. You understand that a Combine Harvester is not a competitor to Yahoo! Pipes?
09. You understand the function of memes in the cultural sociosphere? [If you can understand the relationship between Richard Dawkins, his writings on natural selection, Darwin and John Gray's thoughts on The Human Animal, award yourself untold amounts of points.]
10. Finally. You understand that there is no reason whatsoever for a company to have a FaceBook Page, yes? [Good.]

Ok, so my points system is lame but hey, if you scored more than 50 points you can now apply for any position that includes the following in the job description – Social Media, PR 2.0, Web Content Editor, Blogger, Web 2.0 Communications Director, Online Evangelist, New Media Communications Director, Online Guru…etc, etc, etc…Or you could follow your heart and get that journalism degree.

Updated to include that Telligent was not acquired. Intel Capital is an investor in the company.
Perhaps this has stepped up the B2B social media game. Intel Capital has increased its investment in the social networking platform company Telligent for $20 million according to reports. This deal will not bring us yet-another-social-network, this one is about helping businesses have the right tools at hand to help their brands with customer relations and marketing. In other words Telligent helps those businesses to own their own message online. The platforms software allows two-way interactions between a company and its customers and clients. Telligent manufactures a product called Community Server, which provides clients with blog, forum, wiki, and other collaborative and social software; those clients include the Associated Press, MySpace, Conde Nast, Electronic Arts, Visa, Honda, Dell, and the NFL.

As more companies embrace radical transparency and open themselves up to two-way communication with their clients and customers we may see more deals of this kind very soon. The space is becoming competitive.

Marshall Kirkpatrick at ReadWriteWeb posts that Microsoft has hired danah boyd, who Marshall says is – “probably the most high profile academic in the world focused on the emerging web and its social consequences.”

boyd (who only uses lowercase when typing her name) is a leading expert on how the next generation is using social networks. She caused a ruffle when she concluded in a report that “The goodie two shoes, jocks, athletes, or other ‘good’ kids are now going to Facebook. …MySpace is still home for Latino/Hispanic teens, immigrant teens, ‘burnouts,’ ‘alternative kids,’ ‘art fags,’ punks, emos, goths, gangstas, queer kids, and other kids who didn’t play into the dominant high school popularity paradigm.”

She spells out her own thoughts on joining Microsoft Research New England here.

One thought re Microsoft and its compulsive obsession with the desktop…aren’t the next generation of social networkers supposed to be surfing exclusively via mobile devices?

Pic ©Losanjealous.com

We live in a world of constant updating. News moves swiftly from PDA to mobile phone to laptop to desktop in seconds. We Twitter, we text, we temper our every moment if we are not careful; we modify our immediate world-view for consumption online to passive recipients who make what they will of our digital discourse. Who owns the information that you have set free? Dwell on that a minute as I move on.

Google is your friend for research and your archenemy if you don’t own what Google’s spiders discover as they crawl every nook and cranny of the web. The information that others post about you or your company should reference content that you have delivered, written and posted yourself and preferably be content that can be verified easily from third party sites and other online sources. Own your message, if you don’t someone else will.

Today I received an email from the publicists for the indie rock band, The Airborne Toxic Event [we'll leave the Don Delillo reference aside for now,] which contained an open letter to a ‘music critic,’ Ian Cohen, who works for the indie music fans’ online bible, Pitchfork. In short, in his review of the band’s new album, he eviscerated it as a work of musical plagiarism.

Cohen is of course entitled to his opinion, his purview as a critic demands it. He is a filter and an influencer and he writes for Pitchfork which in turn operates within those same modern parameters; Pitchfork has taken on the mantle of challenging the once-hallowed print journals of music criticism and therefore its responsibility does not end at the node of an ISP. Within that responsibility lies a problem – the print magazines had editors. Editors who once were the filters and influencers, soft blocking and often hard balling writers who turned in weak copy, guiding and counseling writers who had the metaphorical fish on the line and teaching them how to land the story. The internet has swept that aside and Pitchfork has happily built and attached its business to those loose moorings.

Worse still, Pitchfork does not embrace openness – you cannot comment on any of the posts – it’s a good old-fashioned web site, so communication is restricted and readers opinions will never be taken in to consideration.

And that’s why The Toxic Airborne Events’ open letter to the music blogs of the world was a very smart move. They were able to calmly and sensibly challenge Ian Cohen’s review without stooping to the same low levels that his review had reached. They took the high road. They accept his criticism but challenge the presumptions he has formed about the band – “You’re wrong about our intentions, you’re wrong about how this band came together, you don’t seem to get the storytelling or the catharsis or the humor in the songs, and you clearly have some misconceptions about who we are as a band and who we are as people.”

And they don’t hold back as they defend the music scene in Silverlake and Los Feliz that was once much lauded by writers such as Cohen – “….it also seems to have very little to do with us. Much of your piece reads less like a record review and more like a diatribe against a set of ill-considered and borderline offensive preconceptions about Los Angeles. Los Angeles has an extremely vibrant blogging community, Silver Lake is a very close-knit scene of bands. We’re one of them. We cut our teeth at Spaceland and the Echo and have nothing to do with whatever wayward ideas you have about the Sunset Strip. That’s just bad journalism.”

In the face of a negative online story The Airborne Toxic Event did exactly right thing – they responded immediately and intelligently. No Pitchfork swift-boating for them.

Click image to register for free download.

On September 23rd, Michael Moore offers his new movie, Slacker Uprising, as a free download on the Internet. The movie charts the rise of a new generation of young voters who are eager for change. The trailer doesn’t mention either presidential candidate by name but Moore has made no bones about his distaste for the current administration’s policies while in office for the past eight years.

Click image to watch trailer.

The feed reader was packed this morning with the buzz about Google’s new open source web browser, Chrome. Or rather the comic book about it, written and drawn by Scott McCloud. From the Google source – The browser will include a JavaScript Virtual Machine called V8, built from scratch by a team in Denmark, and open-sourced as well so other browsers could include it. One aim of V8 was to speed up JavaScript performance in the browser, as it’s such an important component on the web today. Google also say they’re using a “multi-process design” which they say means “a bit more memory up front” but over time also “less memory bloat.” When web pages or plug-ins do use a lot of memory, you can spot them in Chrome’s task manager, “placing blame where blame belongs.”

Found on Twitter via @MarshallK – Link to story on ReadWriteWeb

Chasing the story, chasing the numbers. This presidential campaign season is a tricky time for the TV networks. It seems that the network evening newscasts and network news divisions are struggling to pin down any hard stories. The media pundits are flailing around as the Democratic Convention didn’t go the way they had predicted, [Clinton this, Clinton that, disaffected feminists revolt etc,] and now with Hurricane Gustav hitting the Gulf Coast the Republican Convention has been downsized and all the top journalists and commentators have decamped to the storm zone.

It’s very telling, and yet still amazing, that here we are in 2008 with the networks covering the presidential race while looking longingly over their shoulders at the 2000 race, a time when YouTube had yet to make its mark. They have not been paying attention. The networks are still looking for ratings and are judging their results based on the number of viewers they attract. Yet, as Frank Rich writes in his op-ed article on Sunday, Andrew Rasiej, the founder of Personal Democracy Forum, which monitors the intersection of politics and technology, points out that when networks judge their success by who got the biggest share of the television audience, “they are still counting horses while the world has moved on to counting locomotives.” [Rasej also runs TechPresident, a group blog that covers how the 2008 presidential candidates are using the web.] The Web, in its infinite iterations, is eroding all 20th-century media.

On cable, CNN consistently beat ABC, NBC and CBS in the ratings last week according to Nielsen, but as media are being transformed cable news channels may not last much longer either.

it was laughable seeing the networks fall over themselves as they struggled to understand how Obama got to the nomination. Obama’s supporters didn’t have that problem. As Rich says “the Obama campaign has long been on board those digital locomotives.” The Obama campaign has been telling its story online well beneath the radar of the mainstream media. When the networks focused on how many people turned up at Invesco Field to watch and listen to Obama they were counting horses. Meanwhile the real story lies in how many people are following the candidate’s every move online. Obama’s fund-raising and organizational networking online is unknown. That might give the networks another big surprise come November.

And then another fast-moving story breaks. As Hurricane Gustav moves over land and dies down the networks can switch their attention to the Republican VP nominee, Sarah Palin, whose 17 year old daughter is pregnant. That’s one that will have them horse counting.

Sports, technology, iconic brands and social networking all wrapped up in one package – Nike+ there are only winners here. The Nike+ Sports Kit has allowed athletes to share their data with friends and others who then compete online. This coming together of computer and running shoe technology between Apple, who’s iPod is a way to gather and upload the runner’s data (speed, distance, steps etc) and Nike who’s shoes include the Piezoelectric accelerometer for measuring the data.

And now a campaign to register runners globally to run a 10k and have every mile tracked whether they run, walk or jog and Nike will count those miles towards a charity of its choice. Time to get away from the monitor.

Ma.gnolia announces upgrades to its social bookmarking service.

Why M2?
The decision to re-build Ma.gnolia arises from trying to solve a number of problems faced by the current
design, and the desire to continue evolving Ma.gnolia’s features and technology:

• The current architecture requires considerable effort to maintain the large volumes of activity and data
that customers bring to Ma.gnolia. Keeping up with this growth, exploring interesting new technolo-
gies like OpenID and OAUTH, mitigating the effects of illegitimate use of the service, have come at the
expense of delaying other plans, such as the introduction of pro-level services.

• A single service cannot be all things to all people. Feature requests come in faster than we can make
changes. Moreover, requests are sometimes mutually exclusive, and can be at odds with the values be-
hind Ma.gnolia and its wider community of customers.

• Some of the core technologies used to build Ma.gnolia, such as Ruby on Rails, have matured in both
quality and best practices. While updates and refactoring of the existing codebase could help, those ap-
proaches won’t be as effective as a ground-up re-write.

• Although existing API approaches are well-received, the current architecture is not suited to the emerging direction of modern web services, exemplified by technologies like Google’s OpenSocial and Facebook’s F8.

• A major re-design is required to truly take advantage of lessons learned over 3 years. These issues range across identity, reputation, spam, privacy and contact management, cross-service presence, operational costs and the personal and organizational goals that customers bring to a social bookmarking service.

And the important news for existing users is -

• A free, ad-supported Ma.gnolia will continue to be available for private individuals, as it is now. Existing accounts, with all settings and content will migrate to M2 with no action required by members.
• The ability to download and manage one’s own Ma.gnolia installation, completely public or limited to
select members.
• Business and organizations can subscribe to enhanced features and custom services.

In a mashup culture all manner of digital and graphic goodies get mashed. Mashup artists run along a tightrope that is pinned at one end by copyright law and the other by fair use doctrines. There is no safety net not even under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act [DMCA]. If a copyright holder feels her work has been infringed then out go the takedown letters followed by legal action if the perp doesn’t roll over and submit. See the news about Muxtape being taken down by the RIAA.

Given the RIAA’s jackboot tactics it is heartening to hear that Jim Davis the creator of the popular comic strip Garfield did not automatically send out cease and desist letters to Dan Walsh who created a knock off of the strip called Garfield Minus Garfield. As Walsh has posted in his site’s header “Garfield Minus Garfield is a site dedicated to removing Garfield from the Garfield comic strips in order to reveal the existential angst of a certain young Mr. Jon Arbuckle. It is a journey deep into the mind of an isolated young everyman as he fights a losing battle against loneliness and depression in a quiet American suburb.”

So what did Jim Davis of Garfield fame do? Not only did he embrace the spirit of Garfield Minus Garfield but he reached out to Dan Walsh and together they have signed a book deal.

Epic. RIAA, record labels and artists please wise up. [Thanks to Otis for the heads up.]

Related Post: Mashups, Girl Talk and Me

Magic Flashlights from Mike Benson on Vimeo.

Art 4 Life at StudioNemo from Dave Allen on Vimeo.

There’s never a dull day at Nemo but when kids come in the energy level always kicks higher. Here’s a bunch of kids from Art4Life art camp putting together a poster for their class with the StudioNemo crew.

CNet blog The Social reports that AOL’s People Networks division, formed when the company acquired Bebo, has picked up a new friend: Socialthing, a Boulder, Colo.-based start-up that aggregates social feeds from sites like Digg, Twitter, and Flickr.

Now why couldn’t those Georgian guys have captured a live one? They say they saw three more after all.

Here we go, Mark our Creative Director asks me – Which brand do you think is responsible for the hoax? And, will it bring more anger and thunder down on that brand for pulling off the prank in the first place? I turn it over to you wise social media pundits. Will this end in tears? Let’s hope the brand involved isn’t catering to anyone below 40 years old as the first Bigfoot hoax was perpetrated in 1958.

Here’s a few words from the lucky guy who found the gnarly specimen – “I’m not asking anyone to believe us,” Mr. Dyer said. “I’m just asking them to sit and watch, because you’re going to eat your words.”

Along with the New York Times I’ll be waiting with interest for the news conference tomorrow out of Palo Alto, CA, for what has been affectionally named Blobsquatch. Meanwhile, it’s back to working on the Yeti-found-snowboarding-on-Everest campaign….

Click image to Play

Today’s Digital Youth are already well-versed in Trust and Fame, they understand very clearly that their song, their video is only as good as the one that went before it on YouTube unless it is awesome, catchy and fun. Seattle’s Natalie Portman’s Shaved Head worked with the video crew That Go to cut this clip for their song ‘Sophisticated Side Ponytail.’ That Go also made a great clip for Thunderheist recently.

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.”

We seem to have dropped into a musical theme over the weekend and with that in mind I wanted to point out a post that David Byrne wrote on his blog. As you can see above he is pondering the idea of less press and pr and more online discovery. I believe Byrne is doing the right thing as there will be plenty of buzz around a new Byrne and Eno album on the blogosphere. And Byrne and Eno are both influencers and trusted sources. Those two elements alone will help any PR 2.0 campaign gain traction. I posted a slide show about PR 2.0 here, and also wrote an essay about Social Media, Blogs and Advertising which can be found here. Meanwhile I’m looking forward to spreading the word on the new Byrne and Eno album, Everything That Happens Will Happen Today. You can hear a cut from the new album and download it too. Click Here.

Happy Prescriptions “Thought it’d lead us..”

Getting it right, getting exposed. A comment on the Girl Talk post, left by a user named ‘Natron’ led me to a web site for Happy Prescriptions, no doubt the web site for said ‘Natron’ who it turns out is a Portland musician. Another click of a hand [you have to visit the site to get that] led me to Happy Prescriptions MySpace where I found the video above. There’s also a free MP3 ep there. Circle complete.

Girl Talk live in Detroit. Photo – Christos/Detroitartist.org

Gregg Gillis is more well known as the musician Girl Talk. And he believes very strongly that he is a musician and not, as many people have called him, a DJ. If you haven’t heard his work you might wonder why there would be any issue for Gillis but upon hearing his craftily designed songs you will notice that each track is made up of many short snippets of samples of songs that you know you’ve heard somewhere else. On his recent album, Feed The Animals, that he released online Radiohead-style on Illegal Art he told the New York Times that it includes more than 300 samples and that he estimates that each minute of “Feed the Animals” took him about a day to create. That’s a lot of days.

More importantly though his preferred method of “song writing,” i.e. using riffs borrowed from other people’s work puts him front and centre in the debate over copyright law and fair use. His stance is that he is using such tiny samples of other people’s work that he argues his actions are protected under fair use. Not all legal experts agree but so far he has avoided the threat of litigation.

As a musician [I am a founding member of the UK post-punk band, Gang of Four] with my own copyrights I share his stance as I believe that copyright laws have become far too stringent and are now limiting artists’ abilities to be creative. Many people would like to see the law relaxed in certain areas to allow more creativity to spring forth. One area that definitely falls under the term known as gray is the practice of creating mashups. A Mashup in the musical form is exactly what Gillis is doing, literally intermingling or layering beats and samples from various songs on top of and into each other. The end result is surely a completely new work. As Wikipedia puts it – a mashup is a digital media file containing any or all of text, graphics, audio, video, and animation, which recombines and modifies existing digital works to create a derivative work.

Any digital media is open to the process of mashing, and just like a collage, where found images are most commonly rendered onto a canvas, the end result of this creative process should be considered a new original work. There should be no threat of litigation for artists such as Gregg Gillis who create these new works of musical digital art. Go here to hear Gillis in action as Girl Talk and see how many songs you recognize.

In that spirit I post here a mashup that I recently created in collaboration with the musician Jon Ragel who goes by the moniker Boy Eats Drum Machine. Rather than sampling we decided to actually perform the mashup by playing live in the studio on top of sampled drums. The song borrows parts from the artists Talking Heads, Aaliyah, Van Halen and The Cure.

BEDM feat. Dave Allen – Talking Heads/Aaliyah/Van Halen/Cure Mashup [MP3] Click to play, right click to download.

It seems that the powers that be at Facebook and their archenemies over at the record labels need to hurry up and reach agreement on what is Fair Use when it comes to posting videos online. I received yet another lovely notice from Facebook today about “possible infringement” not “actual” but “possible.” Read on -

Notification of Alleged Copyright Infringement
We have removed your video entitled “Cut Copy, party at Dave’s, Nemo puts up the posters” uploaded at 2:23pm April 29th, 2008. We did this because we learned that your video might include copyrighted material owned by a third party, such as a video clip or background audio. If you are the copyright owner, or have permission from the rights holder to upload and distribute this material on Facebook, you may file a counter notice of alleged infringement by following the link below.

The Facebook Team
copyright@facebook.com

So lets refer to the video from the Electronic Frontier Foundation that spells out our rights under the DMCA rules.

Here’s the story behind the video that was taken down. The Australian band, Cut Copy, and their manager Neil are friends of mine. I invited the band to dinner at my house in Portland prior to their show in town. We had a good time, we shot video, I edited it and posted it. Seemed harmless enough but clearly not. I have filed a counter claim with Facebook so we’ll see how that goes. And someone should let Universal Music know that I fed Cut Copy dinner that night too….I’ll send Universal a bill… Watch another video from the same night here.

Related Post: How YouTube Could Make Some Money with Viacom

AdWeek reports that “Federated Media Publishing, the blog-centric ad network helmed by Industry Standard founder John Battelle, has partnered with Microsoft to launch CrowdFire, a music-themed social media platform where fans can share and consume videos, photos and personal accounts from live concerts.”

Reading the story and then digging through the CrowdFire site I can’t help but feel that this is just yet-another-social-network. The site is clean enough and easy to navigate but seems a bit jargon-heavy as in the use of the word crowdsource. And Battelle comes over as oddly quaint when he says that the idea for CrowdFire was sparked when he attended several recent music festivals, and saw how prominent cell phone cameras and other portable video recording devices have become. That sounds so 2000 to me….

HCSC Photo Workshop -Day 3- Tim Zimmerman from Dave Allen on Vimeo.

The HCSC campers woke to Mother Nature playing a game with the weather. The mountain was socked in. While they waited for the clouds to lift, Tim Zimmerman instructed the class all about digital workflow, processing and storage. The clouds lifted on High Cascade and we hit the snow. Molly Aguirre, Hanna Teter, Jeremy Jones all hucked for the workshop shooters.

My good friend Brian Zisk, the man behind the always interesting SanFranMusicTech Conference, has announced the next gathering. It will be back at San Francisco’s Hotel Kabuki on October 20th. There are early bird tickets currently available through August 8th which you can grab here. I will be there as a panelist along with the following folks:

Bob Heyman – Mediasmith, Chief Search Officer
Steve Jang – imeem, CMO & Head of Business Development
Ethan Kaplan – Warner Music Technology, VP
Rachel Masters – Ning, VP of Strategic Relationships
Jack Moffit – Speeqe, CEO / Chesspark, CEO & Lead Developer / IceCast Streaming Media Server, Creator / Xiph Foundation, Co-Founder
Sean O’Connell – Music Allies, Founder & CEO
Dave Ulmer – Motorola, Sr. Director Multimedia Products and Services
Carnet William – Sprout, Co-Founder & CEO
Brian Zisk – SanFran MusicTech Summit, Executive Producer / Future of Music Coalition, Technologies Director

At Nemo we have recently been spending much of our time in “thought leader” mode, to coin a phrase. Like any modern integrated marketing and branding company we are charged with advising our clients on how to approach the convoluted and ever-shifting world of social networks and social media advertising.

On this blog I have outlined many thoughts about why companies shouldn’t necessarily dive headfirst into the world of blogs and social media – here’s a post that includes a useful ‘how-to top ten’ list.’ It’s entitled “Why Does Corporate Social Networking Fail? It’s not cynical, and hopefully it’s useful to anyone pondering the issues of how their company should be represented online.

If we look at social networking before the advent of the internet, pre-Facebook etc, it literally meant that we gathered in tribes; ‘birds of a feather flock together’ goes the old saying. It’s as true today as the day the phrase was coined. Many people who have like-minded pursuits happily gather socially at predetermined venues or destinations to share their love of something. During my different life-stages in England growing up, that meant for me – soccer, pubs, punk rock.

Today we see the ability to share common interests multiplied as never before and of course I do mean “see” it; it’s called the Web and it lives up to its name.

At Nemo we don’t pretend to have the answers. We are still asking the questions. So I decided that it might be a good idea to invite Rachel Masters, Ning Inc’s VP of Strategic Development, to talk to us about the Ning social networking platform and the tools they are providing for anyone to build a social network.

Rachel walked our audience through a few examples of companies using the Ning platform to connect with their core consumers, but none was as compelling as the Saturn Cars site. It’s a great example of a company understanding and embracing America’s love affair with the automobile. If you love your Saturn this is the go-to site. If you are a marketing executive at a company that is thinking of embracing social media then have your team take a look at Saturn’s Ning network. It might just make you look like you understand social media….

Here’s a transcript of the talk on OakHazelnut from @caseorganic who was in the audience. And here’s a video of part of Rachel’s presentation.

While digging around the web for some ideas on social media that are more subversive, in other words ones that challenge the current model, [given that the current corporate model is "we should start a blog or a Facebook page,"] I came across an article on Marktd.com of a presentation given by Ed Cotton of Influx Insights at the PSFK Conference where he discusses Trends and Inspiration.

Based on the idea that trends are themes and attitudes that can be tracked over time, not fads, Cotton provides a list of 9 inspiration themes: Envy, Improvisation, Combinations, Looking Backwards, Frustration, Timing, White Space, Out of Context, Insight Driven. He then gives some interesting examples.

Envy: Creatives are envious of other creative people. ([For example the Beatles were envious of - and thus inspired by - the Beach Boys.]
Improvisation: You have limited resources and you take what’s around you and do something with it. Let’s play games with trends. [e.g Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies.]
Looking Backwards – We shouldn’t be slaves to the new. Frank Gehry was inspired by the 1920s movie Metropolis.
Frustration: Steve Jobs was frustrated with our cell phones, thus the iPhone.
Timing: The secret of success lies between “feels right” and outside confirmation. If you wait for the research to tell you you’re right, you’ll miss the boat.
White Space: Method saw white space in cleaning, resulting in the creation of non-toxic, well designed cleaning products.
Out of context: taking the subversive mainstream. Pixar has a college in their building. Take your creatives to places where the trends are, places where they’ll be inspired.
Insight Driven: IDEO noticed that kids hold toothbrushes differently. So instead of towing the line and making kids brushes smaller, they made them fun and easy to hold

The takeaway here is simple – immerse your people into a creative and inspiring environment from which they can learn ways to look at ideas and trends from a different point of view. It fits into Nemo’s methods as we consider our shop a “college” where our employees come to learn not just to work.

Photo courtesy Thor Swift/Wired.com

Found on the Wired blogs. Google’s Udi Manber spends endless time thinking about how search can be improved. One big reason many searches don’t succeed, he believes, is that despite the 20 billion or so Web pages in Google’s indexes — including the 2 million items in Wikipedia — the information simply isn’t there.

“The process will take 20 seconds with credit cards,” says Knol product manager Cedric Dupont. Phone checks will take a minute or so. This vetting, Manber hopes, will give knols accountability and, in the case of high-status authors, the benefit of a solid reputation.

Update: Here’s Knol from Google.

The folks from Tumblr left a post on Social Media Today about an overhaul to the Tumblr platform.

In their own words – We’re getting ready to push some major updates over the next few weeks, and we wanted to give you a heads-up on changes to our custom theme engine. We’ve tried to make Tumblr themes as open and customizable as possible, and the things you’ve created have blown our minds. But there are still things we’ve wanted to do that haven’t been easy enough.

So next Monday we’ll be scrapping our old code for a completely overhauled template engine. We’re seriously excited about this, and we can’t wait to see what you’re able to do with it.

The most noticeable improvements:

* The new engine is scoped, so you’ll be able to nest and repeat blocks and variables.
* The engine uses a new token parser that will support special syntax for API hooks.

This will let your theme call back for content, like:

{​block:Posts type=”photo” tagged=”spotlight” count=”5″}
” />
{/block:Posts}

We’ve been systematically testing the new engine to make sure it’s backwards compatible. You can test it yourself by adding ?beta=1 to any tumblelog URL [e.g. http://www.davidslog.com/?beta=1]. If it’s working correctly, you shouldn’t see a difference.

Please let us know if you see anything funny.

Incidentally I have tested the clunky old Social Space Station theme and it seems to be identical so that’s good. Still waiting on a banner to take the design to a new universe. The Social Space Station is a tumblelog dedicated to presenting, discussing, and discovering interesting things out there in the social media sphere.

As CNet reports today, Hollywood and YouTube may be edging towards their own version of Pax Romana. Meanwhile, beyond the learned walls of the law courts and Google’s battle with Viacom, we here at Social Cache have been scratching our heads over Viacom’s position.

Obviously Viacom is up in arms over what it argues is copyright infringement whenever one of its artists’ songs are used in a user-generated video. Their lawyers are even arguing that in most cases they want to set aside the notion of fair use. That in itself is ridiculous as in a lot of circumstances Viacom has stepped over the edge of copyright boundaries. In 2007 Viacom sent YouTube 100,000 takedown notices! And as this video from the EFF points out, many of those videos that Viacom had asked YouTube to remove, were not infringing anyone’s copyright.

We ourselves received a takedown notice and had a video removed from YouTube. The video was of one of our numerous snowboarding expeditions to Mt Hood and it included a clip of a song by the group White Zombie. We could have argued that under the law if we had used the music for parody, for comment, for criticism, for news reporting or for non-commercial use then we’d be in the clear. In this instance it was the latter – non-commercial use. We couldn’t be bothered, we weren’t that attached to the video and anyway, like millions of other folks, we put up videos at an alarming rate. Here’s our latest.

So here’s the Nemo and Social Cash POV. By removing our video Viacom denied thousands of people the pleasure of hearing a White Zombie song. One of its own artists! And no money was changing hands. One solution – Viacom should provide YouTube with a license from a roster of its artists who agree that their music can be used in a video for non-commercial use. In return YouTube provides its users with a simple license that allows users to add music from these artists to their amateur videos for non-commercial use for a small fee of, perhaps $3.00. Now Viacom and its artists get a share of this revenue, YouTube users won’t receive takedown notices, and Viacom can go a long way to recouping its, no doubt, millions of dollars it is spending on these lawsuits.

You’re welcome. Let me know why it won’t work….

Meanwhile over at MySpace, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation has a business that’s built on the backs of thousands of unsigned musicians. Who is looking out for them?

For decades now the dream of media types and ad firms has been to convert the humble remote control from a mere volume and channel changer to a spangly ‘product buying module.’ Tivo and Amazon are announcing a partnership today that introduces a “product purchase” feature via Tivo’s DVR service.

The idea is simple – turn the Tivo remote into a tool for buying the products being advertised and promoted on commercials and talk shows. If a talk show host talks up a book, Blu-Ray disc or CD, Tivo viewers will see onscreen menus with links to buy those products.

The NYT reports that – In the months ahead, TiVo plans to begin offering this feature to advertisers and programmers, so that the chance to buy products and have them delivered will be presented to viewers during commercials and even alongside product placements during live shows.

“Just a few years ago, we were viewed with great paranoia as the disruptor,” said Thomas S. Rogers, chief executive of TiVo. “Our goal now is to work with the media industry to come up with ways to resist the downward pressure of less advertising viewing and create a way for advertising on TV to become more effective, more engaging and closer to the sale.”

Tivo is now positioning itself away from media industry disruptor – offering its customers ways to skip ads, to media industry saviour, but not without Mr Rogers sowing the seeds of paranoia – “As DVRs get more popular, “the majority of commercials in home will be fast-forwarded through,” he said. “It is critical that there be a form of advertising and a transactional solution that underpins the DVR, or the economics of television are going to be substantially undermined.”

This is serious news when it comes to business networking and social media, I see a serious win-win here for both parties. There has been some debate recently about Facebook and how seriously it can be taken when it comes to businesses using the Facebook network to extend their social media ambitions as well as advertise across it. I would argue that the LinkedIn/NYT partnership steps up the ante for both Facebook and MySpace; the NYT, one of the world’s great media institutions that has seriously embraced the internet to further its business, may be on a path to shaking off its “Grey Lady” image and LinkedIn, which, although having only 25 million registered users making it small by social network standards, is by far the doyen of social sites for serious business users. We’ll see how this one unfolds.

Kudos, once again to Marshall Kirkpatrick for breaking the story.

My Online Marketing Presentation About Radiohead from iaintait on Vimeo.

Q. How do we reach these young people? A. You don’t, you wait for them to invite you

The social media folks and their blogs have been buzzing lately over a story that seems to have come from Deloitte but perhaps was more widely circulated by the WSJ. Josh Catone at Sitepoint drilled down further into the story from where it got picked up by Marshall Kirkpatrick on ReadWriteWeb.

Both Josh and Marshall have great points and their posts are a good read. Marshall’s post had the most provocative headline – Corporate Social Networks Are A Waste of Money, Study Finds. I thought I’d pick up the story there – A Waste of Money. Companies have a bad habit of throwing money at everything that moves, especially if it looks like “something we should be doing.”

Here are my thoughts distilled from my own writings on the subject and insights borrowed from Josh and Marshall’s posts:

Here’s an extract from my essay ‘On Social Media, Blogs and Advertising.’ – 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.” Read the rest of this post here.

With that thought what follows is:

Businesses can not “build a community” however much money they throw at the idea. They merely need to look outside of their own walls, find the influencers who are already championing their products and join the communities that already exist.

Businesses can not attract “visitors” as measured in traffic to their sites. People who enjoy their products will be talking about them elsewhere in other communities. See above.

Businesses have to realize that having a Facebook page for their products makes them look ridiculous and could actually harm the brand. See my post about Spraychel and “her” Facebook page brought to us by the folks behind I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter®

It is the way of businesses to make predictions about their market. They should not invest in software that makes predictions, or even social-networking technology, unless they have discovered a clear market need.

Positive word of mouth marketing by online communities that enjoy a businesses’ product is a far better metric than the ratio of visits to the corporate web site or its community.

Online communities led by influencers that champion a businesses’ products are doing just that, championing the products not the corporation that brought them to market.

So what should businesses do? Here’s a list that I have reworked to address businesses as it was originally written with rock bands in mind.

They should:
01. Run a blog to which actual company members post regular updates.
02. Ensure that the blogosphere is alerted to any new and breaking news or important posts.
03. Offer early access to special offers and discounts for their customers loyalty.
04. Give away free samples of their product.
05. Be active in their customers online communities.
06. Never push unwanted messages to their customers.
07. Ask their customers to interact directly with their product, for example through competitions and giveaways.
08. Allow the sharing of their products amongst a community.
09. Work closely with influencers.
10. Embrace radical transparency. Openly discuss their problems with their customers and allow negative comments to remain on their blogs.

That’s the top ten; number 11 in my list would include – have dedicated staff working on your company’s online communication 24/7.

Read more of our thoughts on Social Media here.

Well, either Gary Busey has or GotVMail has. Gary appears to be “tired and emotional” as Private Eye would say, so it’s sure to be viral.

Once the mainstream media and the more hysterical tech blogs have got over the fact that the success of the iPhone 3G launch caused Apple’s servers to be overloaded, we can sit back and take stock.

I own the iPhone v.1 and I’m currently happy without 3G access so I remain content with my device. One reason for staying put with the original model is that the new software update from Apple brings some rather cool new applications [or Apps in the vernacular,] that improve the original phone’s productivity.

I chose a couple of productivity apps, Zenbe, a list sharing tool and Jott, a voice to text tool. I got AirMe for uploading my iPhone pictures up to my Flickr account and added MPG and Spend [no link available, tsk, tsk] so if I care I can track my miles per gallon in the Element and set budgets for my gourmand extravaganzas. These apps all perform well without G3 and most were free. One app that fell into the epic fail bucket was Reqall. Couldn’t sign up on the iPhone and couldn’t load the web site either. Fail! Turns out that Jott does the same stuff anyway.

The most interesting app of all is Loopt which enables users to broadcast their whereabouts and send a status of a broad set of services and find interesting locations and reviews nearby. This could be the next breakout social networking platform as it works best from the phone [mobiles, not just the iPhone] and is simple to update ala Twitter. In fact it has a Twitter plug-in so you can post once and hit Twitter too. Follow me on Twitter here.

One problem though – Loopt could be a predators dream. In fact Loopt’s Be Safe page spells out in no uncertain terms that you need to control who has access to your location.

Anyway, here’s my thinking behind the title of this post. David Griner wrote a post entitled Are Blogs Still Good Places for Conversation? which at first glance I took as simply a Google bait tactic. The answer would seem to be “of course they are.” He raises a good point but I still believe a good, well written blog is the place for conversation. Twitter, a micro-blog, is not. I use my Twitter account to drive traffic back to my blog where the conversation can really open up. After all Twitter only allows 140 characters so truncated updates are the norm, which is fine. If I follow Marshall Kirkpatrick on Twitter I get up-to-the-minute breaking tech news from him but I prefer to read his blog at Read Write Web for a more in-depth review. On both my blogs, the other being Pampelmoose, I enjoy reading comments that can often be longer than the original post – something that is impossible with Twitter.

Joining the conversation and being invited in are two things I have stressed when it comes to advising our clients on their forays into social media advertising. A blog is the right venue for extending conversations, not a micro-blog. By all means post links to your original content stories to Twitter so that interested followers can link to your blog. Be sure to use FriendFeed to share your blog posts with others, use Tumblr too for the same reason, but understand that many of the social networking arenas, Twitter, Loopt even Facebook, are way ahead of the general online populations’ capacity to juggle all of them, and those folks not partaking in every widget, bell and whistle are your customers too.

Run a blog, embrace radical transparency, get invited in to communities that might enjoy your products and join the conversation. But whatever you decide to do, don’t do this – OHSU Director’s Blog. If you don’t immediately see why feel free to ask me.

John Mellencamp, free songs via Vanity Fair

Thinking about social advertising and targeted marketing perhaps we should take a leaf out of the book of the rock stars. The biggest story last year in the music world was how Radiohead bucked the recording industry’s distribution and marketing system and gave away their new album. The short story is that they simply told their fans that they could go to a Radiohead web site and pay whatever they liked to download the album, with $0.00 being an acceptable amount. It was an extremely successful campaign – not only did most people pay for the files but the band received unprecedented amounts of positive media coverage around the globe.

Other bands have followed the model not least Trent Reznor and his band Nine Inch Nails. The band released a limited edition 2,500 units of a coffee table book that included multiple CDs and DVDs. It was exquisitely packaged, signed and numbered and cost $300.00. It sold out in two days.

I believe this form of social marketing could serve as a model for companies that have customers who are literally fans of their products. And I don’t mean Apple.

If we think of the bands mentioned above as companies that sell product then we can take a look at what these companies have been doing to increase sales of their product. Here’s what they do online:

01. They have blogs to which actual band members [think executives] post regular updates.
02. They ensure that the blogosphere is alerted to any new and breaking news or important posts.
03. They offer early access to special offers and discounts for their customers loyalty.
04. They give away free samples of their product.
05. They are active in their customers communities.
06. They never push unwanted messages to their customers.
07. They ask their customers to interact directly with their product through competitions.
[Both Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails had remixing competitions where they made tracks available to their fans for that purpose.]
08. They allow sharing of their products amongst a community.
09. They work closely with influencers.
10. They openly discuss their problems with their customers and allow negative comments to remain on their blogs.

Number 11 in my list would include the fact that they have dedicated staff working on this online communication 24/7.

These “companies” also use printed media to their advantage too. John Mellencamp has hooked up with Vanity Fair magazine to get two free song downloads into the hands of his fans. This is a win-win for both parties. Here’s the link if you fancy grabbing the songs.

In an article in the Wall Street Journal today [subscription req.] a report says that YouTube will will fall short of revenue expectations. The twist to this chatter is that Google has found that 80% to 90% of video watchers hate to watch pre-roll advertising and they leave the video the minute they see any hint of a pre-roll. The story goes that Google intends to ignore its own research and go ahead with pre-roll anyway.

And the reason that most pages on YouTube are ad free? Because Google is fearful of showing that it is profiting from copyright infringement. They already in the middle of a copyright infringement lawsuit filed by Viacom. That apparently leaves Google with only 4% of the videos being legally a-ok to advertise around as they have been approved by the copyright owners.

Bottom line for Google and the lawsuit they face, is that it is very unlikely they will receive a ruling in their favor to make money from copyright-violating content. It also will be a barrier to entry for anyone trying to launch a social media advertising program around these big content sites. Even Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation doesn’t own the copyright to hundreds of thousands of songs on its MySpace site.

It’s not often I come across a major musical artists’ web site and find that I can say to myself – “these guys got it right.” Today I visited John Mayers site and although I’m not a fan of his music the site is a great example of how to get the message across simply and elegantly while giving his fans the ability to interact on many levels. The tie-in with Blackberry is genius too. The Blackberry micro-site just spreads the Meyer messaging and interactivity far and wide by offering exclusive Meyer content – audio, video, pictures and more.

John says “hi.”

John Meyer has a blog and he seems to use it, at least I hope it’s him because the most egregious offense is having someone else blog for you. I’m going to keep checking back on this one. In fact there are multiple blog links on the home page. This one is written by “Scotty” who may be in the band or may be the T-shirt vendor, it’s hard to tell. The blog focuses on the new T-shirts – “A collaboration with Loomstate – a completely organic, sustainable tee. Very limited… We only made 587 of the shirts, each hangtag is hand-numbered.”

And there’s even a place to send in your encore requests for the shows you’ll attend. Customer happy time I reckon. And client happy too, Blackberry made a wise choice sponsoring this musician.

Credit: Mayer web link found on the Mediapost blogs.

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

Crazy, entertaining, popular? Yes.

Watch it here. Some folks mention 45 million views but I don’t see those numbers. As of today it has 3,262,406 views. Still, nothing wrong with those numbers. As Seth Godin asks, are you sponsoring or advertising on the right sites?

Via Seth’s Blog

As we celebrate Independence Day we can mull this over. Regardless of the facts of the case and Viacom’s complaint it would seem that, as the NYT reports, “the order raised concerns among users and privacy advocates that the online video viewing habits of hundreds of millions of people could be exposed.”

Via the New York Times:
A federal judge in New York has ordered Google to turn over to Viacom a database linking users of YouTube, the Web’s largest video site by far, with every clip they have watched there.

For every video on YouTube, the judge required Google to turn over to Viacom the login name of every user who watched it, and the address of their computer, known as an I.P., or Internet protocol, address. Both companies have argued that such data cannot be used to unmask the identities of individual users with certainty. But in many cases, technology experts and others have been able to link I.P. addresses to individuals using records of their online activities.

Here’s the back story on the lawsuit from FindLaw:

Viacom and its companies filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against YouTube and Google seeking at least $1 billion in damages.

The media company charges that “YouTube has harnessed technology to willfully infringe copyrights on a huge scale,” by taking “the value of creative content on a massive scale for YouTube’s benefit without payment or license. The suit alleges that the copyright infringement is on such a large scale that it “identified more than 150,000 unauthorized clips of their copyrighted programming on YouTube that had been viewed an astounding 1.5 billion times.”

Viacom details the “legitimate licensed channels” that it works with to distribute the company’s copyright-protected content. These partners include Apple’s iTunes Music Store and Joost.

The suit also charges that YouTube selectively deploys filtering technology “[b]y limiting copyright protection to business partners who have agreed to grant it licenses,” even though copyright holders are entitled to protection of their works under federal copyright law without such business agreements.

In the many years that I have had a MySpace page I have never once clicked through on any of the ads pushed to me. Here’s an example in the clip I took from the home page above. I never read Spin Magazine and I can’t stand Coldplay. Even the tag line from Chris Martin – “Our album will probably save the world” fails to entice me as the comment is so shallow. The good news though is that the digital issue of Spin is free. Now they’re thinking.

I’ve been a proponent of the Long Tail theory since stumbling upon Chris Anderson’s blog of the same name. Reading the book affirmed some thoughts I’d had about how certain niche products found a life online that they most certainly would not have found in a regular bricks and mortar retail outlet.

Granted, because of my background in online music distribution the theory immediately appealed to me. I saw it as an idea that would help unlock the gatekeepers stranglehold over the discovery of music either as CDs or legal music files. Those gatekeepers being terrestrial radio, the record companies and online music retailers such as iTunes who wrapped their music files with DRM.

A simple explanation of the Long Tail theory is that the internet gives us unparalleled access to more products across the “tail” and doesn’t just expose us to those mass products at the “head.” It suggests that people are willing to search and pull a song from say, Tortoise, an alternative music outfit that sells modestly, rather than sit back and be bombarded by iTunes trying to sell them, or push, a song from Coldplay. As the theory goes, Tortoise could make a living selling its music vertically in its slice of the tail.

Like any good theory it is open to question and discussion. This is where Anita Elberse steps in with her article in the Harvard Business Review entitled ‘Should You Invest in The Long Tail?’ Meanwhile Chris Anderson has been gracious enough to accept the challenge to his theory by responding to it on his blog.

I need to spend time with the article as it is not only lengthy but includes a lot of data and links to sources, as well as concluding with advice to different businesses on how or not to include the Long Tail in their marketing efforts. Anderson’s responses will take some digestion too. Perspective and insight is required before comment. That’s why it’s frustrating to me that people like Lee Gomes of the Wall Street Journal’s Portals column has jumped in gleefully accusing Wired magazine [where Chris Anderson is Editor-In-Chief] of having a “template” where they “take a partly true, modestly interesting, tech-friendly idea and puff it up to Second Coming proportions.”

Gomes is of course allowed his opinion of Wired magazine articles but I wonder if he has really had time to read and digest Elberse’s paper as well as study Anderson’s responses. It’s also odd that he blames bloggers for “talking up the theory, which is no wonder considering how it held out the promise that even the most obscure among them could win a robust audience.” As a columnist for the WSJ he has been happily debunking the Long Tail theory since it inception as he did in this article from July 2006. Is he more fearful of the Long Tail theory or of the bloggers who may gain audience share along the tail away from the WSJ head?

Whatever the outcome of the debate between Elberse and Anderson I doubt that there will be immediate agreement on the benefits or not of the Long Tail. One things for sure, it is way too soon to be joyfully jumping upon its supposed grave.

David Bowie in persona as Ziggy

David Bowie is, or more correctly, has been one of our more chameleon-like musical performers since the late 60’s. By 1972 when Bowie had adopted a new persona, Ziggy Stardust, his performances were memorable not only for introducing a new genre, Glam Rock, but for his wildly coloured orange hair, his sci-fi inspired modern outfits and his androgynous stance. As the music critic Robert Hilburn says of Bowie in retrospect, it was hard to tell “whether Bowie wanted to be the new Elvis Presley or Judy Garland.”

Bowie’s use of personas to present his music as well as his world-view continued through the albums Aladdin Sane [A lad insane] and Diamond Dogs, and reached its apotheosis with his Thin White Duke persona for the album Station to Station, which many people criticized as too close to a portrayal of a Nazi for comfort. Bowie and his supporters blamed his cocaine addiction at the time. He recovered from the bad press to deliver a trilogy of his greatest work Low, Heroes and Lodger, known as the Berlin Trilogy, all produced by Brian Eno.

All of this brings up an interesting question – Which version of Bowie do/did you relate to the most?

Bowie’s Ziggy persona catapulted him to fame in the USA, but who was more famous? Bowie or Ziggy? If we take the dictionary definition of persona it defines persona as so: the mask or façade presented to satisfy the demands of the situation or the environment. And identity as so: the state or fact of being the same one as described.

That’s not helpful. Bowie could be identified as Bowie as he steps from the stage still in his Ziggy costume if we look beyond his Ziggy persona. For example a fan might exclaim – “that’s David Bowie dressed as Ziggy Stardust.” More likely though a fan would exclaim – “There’s Ziggy Stardust.” Persona and identity become inseparable.

And of course all these thoughts bring me to Social Media which was not an online phenomena in 1972. With regard to personas vs identity on Facebook for instance, I read this post on idunno.org – “The ease by which fake profiles can be created on social networking sites clearly defines the separation between the two concepts. From a technical point of view a users identity is tied to authentication and authorisation (claims in SAML talk); your identity on facebook is your login information nothing more, and we’re gradually becoming well trained not to give that away. What other people recognise “you” by is your persona; the public facing information you provide; and there is no way to check the veracity of that persona, except by validating those incidents or attributes known by shared experience.”

In other words we can argue that we know Bowie was “acting out” his persona mainly in performance because we can “validate those incidents” as mentioned above. On Facebook we may never be able to “validate those incidents” amongst our hundreds of “friends.” I’ve argued before that especially for marketers, they don’t exist.

Meanwhile Bowie was very successful at it, as Robert Hilburn points out referring to the soon to be released 1972 Santa Monica concert – “For the encore, he turned to “Rock ‘n’ Roll Suicide,” a delicate, anthem-ish number from “Ziggy.” Reaching out to the audience, Bowie offered these soothing words: “You’re not alone . . . gimme your hands.” Thousands in the auditorium reached out to him.”

What does Hilburn mean by him?

Vint Cerf, Google’s Internet Evangelist, says that he sees a future where video will be downloaded rather than streamed. If the U.S. had a policy to roll out more broadband capacity users would be able to download an hour of video in 16 seconds. “It’s like the iPod–you can download music faster than you can listen to it,” he told Cnet.

Spraychel, the brand mascot for ‘I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter Spray®’ has her own Facebook page. Oh, and she’s also running for President…. I Can’t Believe It’s…oh never mind.

DNCHARD and LVHARD too, why not?

Here’s the soundtrack to all that – Sébastien Tellier – Sexual Sportswear

A shadowy social network group.

Facebook is getting an assist from Visa Inc.’s marketing machine in its struggle to lure more advertisers. To date, Facebook has not had as much success as was expected in garnering revenues from advertising. The plan with Visa appears to be aimed at small businesses who are using Facebook to look for new customers.

Michael Liedtke reports:
Visa’s service is designed to provide small-business owners with tools and tips on attracting new customers, trimming costs and other ways to make more money. Businesses that belong to the Visa network on Facebook also will be able to communicate with each other to share ideas or even negotiate deals. Internet search leader Google Inc. is providing some of the features on Visa’s business network, including maps, calendars, word processing and a new template for creating expense sheets and business cards. And The Wall Street Journal and Entrepreneur magazine will contribute articles addressing questions posed by businesses that belong to Visa’s Facebook network.

Facebook’s struggle to produce revenue from its site sounds similar to the problems that MySpace has been having. Facebook has 80 million users who play games, share photos, rate music and track their friends’ activities – the idea that they can be bothered to click through on an advertisement that is not relevant to them, and one that just randomly appears on their home page or profile, is a marketing stretch.

As Michael Liedtke writes:
…while the array of applications have helped make Facebook even more popular, few programs are producing revenue for the site, and Facebook still hasn’t proven that its social playground is an effective advertising forum. Finding the right advertising approach also has been a challenge for other social hangouts like News Corp.’s MySpace. Even Google, which runs the Internet’s most lucrative ad system, has had trouble marketing on social networks.

Advertisers and marketers are labouring under the assumption that the information that Facebook has gathered about its users makes it easy to target different groups of them. This is a dubious notion at best. They are a moving target.

As Liedtke points out: …..some advertisers fret that Facebook’s audience will resent commercials amid all the site’s frivolity. Others are leery about their brands showing up on Web pages featuring racy or unsavory content.

Stay tuned.

After reading Nubby’s post on The Power of Celebrities as Brands I came across a post on Sasha Frere-Jones’ New Yorker blog where he talks about Jeff Leeds, a music reporter for the New York Times, who was recently laid off. Frere-Jones has entered into an email discussion with Leeds where they discuss music writing and criticism today:

LEEDS: I’m not sure that it’s so easy anymore to write about the art without acknowledging the commerce or vice versa. It’s also just more fun, as a writer, to inhabit the middle. There is a case to be made that the cultural role and the experience of music now are just inextricably tied to commerce and the new ways that artists and listeners perceive each other. Even as a fan, isn’t your relationship with music and artists at least somewhat different depending on whether you subscribe to e-music, share a station with a friend on Pandora, or watch someone’s show on your cell phone? Is U2 still the same U2 if they’re in an iPod ad? I think the message and the medium are much more intertwined than they were ten years ago.

FRERE-JONES: This behavior parallels the world of online friendships, at least in form. People who could just as easily call or e-mail each other decide to make conversations public through blogs or Twitter or MySpace comments. The platform chosen for each message changes the effect of the words, who can read them, and how long they will hang in the air. (The Web is creating a multiple-exposure version of memory: words remain, reappearing over and over, even if nothing more than cocktail chat. “Nice dress!” echoes in the hall of mirrored servers. An LOL is not an LOL is not an LOL.)

LEEDS: I think that sort of transparency, where we’re all declaring our positions publicly, is here to stay. In music it means that all these little tribes and congregations of fans can mobilize in really powerful ways. And that in turn is contributing so much to the changes you see in the relationship between the artists and the machinery, the industry underneath and around them. It’s a crucial space to watch. I always think of music as Patient Zero in all the disorder that is changing everything in entertainment and media, including, by the way, newspapers. It’s worth paying close attention.

Leeds and Frere-Jones are suggesting here that transparency, aided and abetted through the use of social media, affects the way that music fans “perceive” the artists and the music industry. With its machinations no longer hidden from them, fans interact differently with their favorite musicians. As musical artists use their celebrity to sell products one area where this perception could become dangerous is over-exposure.

In an article in the New York Times, Nothing Sells Like Celebrity, the story of the teenage R&B pop star, Rhianna, her song ‘Umbrella’ and her deal with the umbrella manufacturer, Totes Isotoner, is typical of the arrangements made between a celebrity’s brand and a product these days:

“Rihanna and her representatives wanted Totes to do more, however, than merely use her [song] to peddle a product. They wanted Totes to create customized umbrellas featuring sparkly fabrics and glittery charms on the handles — all recommended by the emerging star and her team. Totes also guaranteed the singer a percentage of the sales of the umbrellas”.

Apparently the arrangement between the star and umbrella company was successful but what does this say about the future of music as an art form? As Leeds says – “I’m not sure that it’s so easy anymore to write about the art without acknowledging the commerce or vice versa.” To paraphrase him – Is Rhianna still the same Rhianna if she’s in an umbrella ad? Do her fans blur the line between seeing her in a video on MTV and then seeing her in a Totes ad?

Sales of hip hop and R&B music have dropped off precipitously lately and many have blamed the over commercialization of the music and its ties to products; too much bling in other words. Does hearing a song repeatedly through an advertisement cheapen the artist and the song? And then in turn, does social media – Facebook, Twitter etc, allow these “little tribes” as Leeds calls them, share the idea that ‘too much exposure is quite enough thanks, we’re moving on to the next artist’…become gospel? I think so. Leeds and Frere-Jones are on to something.

As these all important “little tribes” spin off into tightly-knit social groups online, all of which will independently coalesce around their favorite subjects, be it knitting, hang gliding, musicians, movies, actors et al – the large social media sites and networks will fracture into millions of laser-precise spin-offs. As Frere-Jones says, the words and messages of these “little tribes” become “echoes in the hall of mirrored servers.” As he also says, the web and social media are “creating a multiple-exposure version of memory,” – is that U2 on MTV or U2 in an iPod ad, I may ask myself?

Beware all marketers who intend to try and reach these ever-shifting, nomadic, online groups; as I said in a prior post – the people who are members of these groups don’t exist, only their personas do.

The music industry should be careful too. Music becomes cheapened by being used as a commodity to sell products. The artists behind the music have their celebrity enhanced and they then go on to use their brand to sell more products. Music fans understand that music is now a commodity and refuse to pay for it. The music industry and the artists both complain that no one pays for music and to account for the decline in sales accuse us of stealing it online. The commodity is over-priced; no one is buying it.

First the email in my inbox.

Introducing Keeping Score with Audrey!

Starting this week, TrueCredit’s Newsletter Editor-in-Chief, Audrey O’Dell, brings you a new blog in the Learning Center. Inspired by readers’ questions, Audrey will offer you the scoop on how to get the most out of credit card reward programs and uncover new and different ways to pay off credit cards (debt snowball, anyone?) and that’s only the beginning! Ever wonder how the credit crunch is going to impact you personally? (Maybe it already has!) Whether your mortgage rates will go up or your credit card rate will come down? Ever transfer a credit card balance to another card offering a lower rate—and then been sorry? Or was it a good idea? Read about these credit issues—and more—in Keeping Score with Audrey. It’s just one of the great features TrueCredit brings you to help you manage your credit. Make the TrueCredit Learning Center a regular pitstop on your road to credit health.

Ok I’m interested – I visit Keeping Score With Audrey.

The first thing I notice is the text on the page is left justified so tightly it almost escapes the page but the instant giveaway that this “blog” is not actually a real blog is the simple fact that no one is home. You cannot comment, all you can do is read what is basically an ad for True Credit’s services. You cannot contact anyone, there is no ‘about’ page – who is ‘Audrey,’ does she even exist?

Wait, there’s more – if you attempt to navigate away from this “blog” you receive the following message:

True Credit’s management have made a poor decision here. They clearly do not understand how important authenticity is in the blog world. If they had really done their homework this area of their site would not exist as it stands today. They have broken all the rules of how to reach their customers online.

I find it interesting that David Pogue, the editor of the New York Times’ Personal Tech column has a problem with the idea of free when it comes to promotion online.

He quotes Kevin Kelly – “David, my guess is that rather than seeing an immediate, or even delayed dip in your books sales, that the pirated PDF either made no difference to your sales, or it actually elevated them. Just as ‘free’ radio drives CD and album sales.” A sensible attitude I say. I reference Kevin Kelly in a recent post here.

Pogue also needs to follow Chris Anderson’s Long Tail blog for more on his upcoming book, ‘Free.’

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

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.

Slowly but surely Apple’s iTunes and its accompanying device, Apple TV, are narrowing the gap for me when it comes to TV viewing choices. My cable package with Comcast frustrates me – it’s like the mobile phone provider packages too, you get all locked up with stuff you don’t need, to get access to the stuff you do need. It’s just like walled gardens with the social networks and music services online, it’s a model that has to be broken. And Comcast and other ISP’s need to understand that the end user, their customers, treat Internet access as a utility like electricity so it’s about time that the “one price fits all” model is dismantled too.

With iTunes and Apple TV I can pick and choose the shows I want to watch and I can time-shift, i.e., watch them when I want. If I want to watch all the Deadwood episodes in one weekend marathon I can. And I will own them too and have the ability to watch them anywhere – iPhone, MacBook, iPod.

From Jakob Lodwick

This is what Dane will do for Nemo and our clients:

Flex / Flash Development with ActionScript 2 / 3. Standards Compliant Web Development – XHTML + CSS + AJAX. Server-side Web Development – C# / VB.NET, PHP, JSP, Ruby, Python. Relational Database Design and Implementation. Project specification, prototyping, and information architecture. Application Development C++ / C#

He will also do the following:

Write technical specifications & functional documentation. Recommend hosting, encryption packages, payment gateways and any other technical platforms that a project or client may need. Manage the technical side of a project to ensure accuracy to the project plan, the right use of our code library, and ensuring that the code…..oh never mind.

So, good luck with all that Dane….

Dane joins Nemo from Struck Creative where he helped get the Portland office off the ground and was a Lead Interactive Developer. Prior to that he spent 2 years at the Overland Agency as a Software Engineer and Lead Flash Developer. Before joining Overland he was a freelance Interactive Designer and Developer.

From 1999 – 2003 Dane skipped college to travel in Zimbabwe as a motorcycle repair dude. A photoshopped picture of Dane sporting fake dreadlocks will appear here soon. Dane lives in the Pearl with his better half the famous and lovely Kiala Kazebee.

I use my Facebook page to stay in touch with hundreds of people every day and during the course of those days I post a lot of interesting content that is not available for search by all the usual suspects – Yahoo! Google etc. Not to mention that our Nemo Design Facebook Group can’t be searched either. All because Facebook is a hold out in endorsing the OpenSocial initiative.
Google, Yahoo, and News Corp.’s MySpace.com announced in March that they have formed the OpenSocial Foundation, a nonprofit group to support the OpenSocial initiative that Google kick-started last year to promote a universal standard for developer applications on social-networking sites. Google has focused efforts on creating code, such as the open source OpenSocial APIs and the Social Graph API, to make social data more portable and accessible to applications. Just in case you were worried that all those heavy hitters might have too much control OpenSocial is now managed by an independent organization.
OpenSocial is basically a set of common APIs that application developers can use to create applications that work on any social networks (called “hosts”) that choose to participate.

“As the largest contributor to the memecached system, Facebook has long been a leader and supporter of open source initiatives but will not join the foundation,” a statement from the company read. “The company will continue to evaluate partnership opportunities that will benefit the 300,000 Facebook Platform developers while improving the Facebook user experience.”

So Yahoo! and Google’s search engines are shut out which is a drag.

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.”

“Profits may not have arrived for online video, but venture capitalists are still happy to pick up the bill. More and more U.S.-based, venture-backed online video companies are attracting more and more financing each year, according to Dow Jones VentureSource. Some $460.5 million was invested in such startups in 2007, up from $266.9 million in 2006. And already, in the first quarter of 2008, another $217.3 million rained down on the category.” Story here.

As Facebook continues to become more and more ubiquitous as the social networking tool of the chattering classes it has become obvious to heavy users of FB [me included] that the site needs to give us all not some of the tools to make the experience a one-stop-shop for communicating with both friends, co-workers and business clients. Today Six Apart launched a Facebook application that brings us one step closer to that goal.

Blog It by Typepad for Facebook – Blog It is a free Facebook application which focuses on making it easier for you to create content no matter the blogging platform you use. Blog It brings some of the best social aspects of Facebook to blogging, making it easy for you to let your friends and colleagues around the web know what you’re up to and what you’re writing.

Thanks to Marshall Kirkpatrick at Read Write Web for the news.

I signed up for Dopplr recently. Here’s the blurb from their ‘About’ page.

Dopplr lets you share your future travel plans privately with friends and colleagues. The service then highlights coincidence, for example, telling you that three people you know will be in Paris when you will be there too. You can use Dopplr on your personal computer and mobile phone. It links with online calendars and social networks.

The service has attracted a following among business travellers around the globe. Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia recently named Dopplr his “favorite non-wiki website” in The New York Times Sunday Magazine: “You put in your travel schedule and link to your friends. It allows you to see where everyone is. I love it.”

Their blog will keep you updated with their updates. An iCal/Google calendar feature looks quite handy.

Sometimes things are just in the air. And sometimes those things are nerdy. This week is one of those times. On the heels of reading this article just published on A List Apart – Findability, Orphan of the Web Design Industry, I was forwarded an article about a large local Portland agency adding a Director of Search. Later in the week, I sat in a conference room going over marketing requirements for a client, near the top of the list was “SEO strategy”. This got me thinking again about why we in the industry do the things we do and who we’re doing them for. (Really, I’m the life of the party) Looking at the sort of prototypical web application, something like Wikipedia, the mechanics and reasoning of search are obvious: we’re searching for a specific piece of information, we find an entry on it, we’re happy. For those of us who work in marketing though, the reasoning can become muddled.One of the things that makes interactive attractive to our clients is that it’s very easy to define and retrieve success metrics. If we launch a digital media campaign, it’s nice to be able to tell our client that the banners we made got a .8% click through. We can show charts of drop-off points. And of course – we can show search results. But what do all these things really mean? It shows that people are seeing the message, but says nothing to what they think of it. And even when we can infer some type of opinion, what they don’t show is what the viewer wanted and didn’t find. Our goal is to craft a message, and then try to get as many people as possible to view that message. It’s TV, with craftier Nielsens.

But by viewing the web as a channel, like TV or radio, we’re missing one of the things that is fundamentally great about the web: its a conversation between our clients and their customers. It’s the first and best chance to help our clients create the sort of relationship dynamic that converts the curious into customers and makes customers fanatics. If all we’re doing is helping people find our one way broadcast message, then aren’t we really just finding new and creative ways to say and do the same old thing? On the other hand, if we change the goal from getting our viewers to listen to our client’s pitch to providing viewers with a meaningful experience, and if we start making our clients a part of the communities they’re selling to, then it becomes necessary to expand our conversation from the tactical methodologies of SEO into the more holistic notion known as find-ability.What’s the difference?

If you go and read the article on A List Apart (and you should, but then come right back) you’ll see that there are many things, both technical and non-technical, that go into making a site find-able.What really makes the notion of find-ablity stand out for me though is that at its core, it requires us to consider the relative value of our interactive projects through the lens of the user rather than ourselves or our clients. It makes us ask the question: Are we simply trying to get people to the site from a Google search? Or are we trying to help them find the content and experiences within our site that are meaningful to them? It asks us to look at our sites as more than one monolithic exercise in marketing and instead see it as a collection of content that in some way benefits the user. It transforms the notion of SEO from a metric to a service. It changes the way we look at content, from being something that we create that is consumed by the viewer into something that reacts to the community that views it, that is portable and contextual. We stop writing the narrative and realize that the brand is the vessel into which the community pours its own experiences. At its foundation, the notion of find-ability is far less about technology, and more about a genuine empathy for the people who use our products.

Adobe Photoshop Express has arrived. It’s currently in beta but I’m going to give it a test drive. I’m intrigued about the ability that lets users group images into Web albums and then post them to popular social networking sites. More here.

Are You Taking Advantage of Web 2.0?

David Pogue argues that Web 2.0 offers a direct, more trusted line of communications than anything that came before it.