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A Nemo blog. Dealing with uncommon cents.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           NEMO Presents: Portland Looking Up -Artwork by Chris Donnelly

Join us Friday, August 7, 2009 for the opening reception of Portland Looking Up – featuring the paintings and carvings of artist Chris Donnelly.

Portland Looking Up will highlight Chris Donnelly’s work of paintings and carvings. The exhibit will focus on Donnelly’s travels through Portland, where he became captivated by the shapes of the industrial water towers, and their contrast to the neighborhoods below.

Discovering Portland by bicycle last summer, Chris noticed the shapes quietly looming overhead. Like floating ships or low-tech space ships at rest just above the neighborhoods, these water towers have a presence. As if monuments from a bygone era, they fade into the landscape despite their size and visibility. These giant vessels venerate our most precious resource. The striking blue sky of Portland summer provides the backdrop for these strong shapes. While strong and industrial looking, their round shapes and patina create a friendly character. Painting these pictures helped Chris get to know Portland.

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(l to r) @adognamedpants @pampelmoose @motorcoatdave – pic:Cathy Cheney | Portland Business Journal

The Portland Business Journal ran an article today about the head-to-head that the Portland Advertising Federation and their Rosey Awards show is having with the the Noseys, a non-federated, creative community inspired subversive start-up. The Noseys campaign began on Twitter and has been supported solely by the local creative community that objected to the Rosey Awards’ ‘talking smack’ campaign.

The Noseys is a clear example of how ‘owning the message’ online will always be a difficult task. In this case the PAF president, Jerry Ketel of local ad firm Leopold Ketel, embraced the subversive nature of the Noseys campaign and immediately embraced it. The Noseys viral campaign has now moved beyond the web as this article shows.

Synopsis – No money, grassroots, community support, Flickr and Twitter = Nosey Awards

@noseyawards @adognamedpants @motorcoatdave @pampelmoose

Aaahh the social web. As you can see in the image above, the Portland Ad Federation has an annual awards fest, The Roseys, that honors local agencies who provide the best creative work in marketing and advertising or, as a quick Google search returns, “Portland Advertising Federation: Celebrating 100 Years of Setting the Standard for Portland’s Creative, Design, and Media Community!” [I have a problem with that byline - can an advertising federation set 'the standard' or should the federation be setting standards?] Anyway, I digress.

So, as noted above, PAF has recently launched a web site created by Anthill Marketing for this year’s show, with the motto – “Nothing Says I’m Better Than You Like A Rosey” and “Our City Is Better Than Your City.” On the site you can ’spin a wheel’ [whoop-de-doo] and a needle comes to rest on such intelligent phrases as the ones below:

Austin: “Award winning copy in Austin: Yee-Haw”
Boulder: “There are two things Alex Bogusky can never take away from you: your pride and your Rosey”
Seattle: “Fast Company’s 2009 most creative city. How depressing is that?”
San Francisco: “Goodby this, Goodby that. Fuck Goodby”
Vancouver B.C.: “Remember, this is the city that brought you Alan Thicke and Lover Boy”

Well, well, well… [another side note: you've all heard of a band called The Weakerthans right?]

I’ll cut to the chase – I can see exactly what Anthill/PAF were trying to achieve – “edginess” “talking points” “hope this goes viral” etc etc. Basically they want a social media smackdown; bring it on, Portland will fight that fight, look at our logo we are raising the finger at you, yeah you San Francisco and you Goodby…. unfortunately it comes across as if we’re back in high school here, meanwhile not all of Portland’s creative community has embraced the tone of this campaign.

And so, along comes The Nosey Awards! Two Portland creatives [egged on by me I have to admit,] @adognamedpants and @motorcoatdave, created that site along with the Twitter name @noseyawards and the Twitter search hashtag #noseys. Finally things get interesting…

Here’s a fact – on Twitter no one owns a hash tag. For instance, here’s one #nooneownsahashtag. There, I just created it but I can’t own it because the Twitter community owns it by using it. And so it goes with #roseys and #noseys. Anthill and PAF cannot own #roseys and now that #noseys has come along and is being used by Twitter users who follow the thread, the two hash tags become joined at the hip…take a look at my TweetDeck grab below:

The Rosey Awards can’t shake off the Nosey Awards, they are now one and the same. Wherever the Roseys try to go on Twitter the Noseys will be right alongside. The Roseys and the Noseys can now duke it out all summer long. And this is a good thing. The Noseys are creating a ton of brand awareness for the Roseys – a rising tide lifts all boats. As people pile on this particular bandwagon, both pro and con, those little hash tags will be used thereby elevating the experiential awareness of the Roseys across an extremely wide arc. A campaign like this fits rather neatly into my idea of Authenticity and Authority on the Social Web.

The Roseys and the Noseys smackdown will be worth watching and I know it will create an interesting case study; it might even get more people to join the current 25 people on the Roseys FaceBook Group.

Bryce Kanights- Part 1 of 3 from Nemo Design on Vimeo.

Bryce’s work will be part of the Mixed Mania exhibition at Nemo Friday June 26th – details here.

Once again, Twitter leads me to a great article. It is hard to believe that some people still “don’t get” Twitter but when I use it as I feel it is best used, as a business tool, it is incomparable for exposing me to some great thought leaders. Unlike RSS feeds, by following certain people on Twitter I find the good stuff that’s important to me more directly.

Today’s example is via Jay Rosen @jayrosen_nyu – here’s his Twitter profile – “I teach journalism at NYU, write the blog PressThink, direct NewAssignment.Net, and try to grok new media. I don’t do lifecasting but mindcasting on Twitter.” In the somewhat twisted vernacular of 140 characters he tweeted the following – “Right on, @AmandaRMichel. “Redundancy is a network fact-checking tool.” See her essay on OffTheBus: http://tr.im/pJu3 Learn, @ivortossell.”

I followed the link. The article that was linked to at the Columbia Journalism Review is called Get Off The Bus and it is a fascinating overview of the future of journalism. As Amanda Michel writes – “OffTheBus (OTB) [is] a citizen-powered campaign news site co-sponsored by The Huffington Post and Jay Rosen’s NewAssignment, at New York University’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. Inspired by Timothy Crouse’s The Boys on the Bus, which chronicled a campaign’s ability to manipulate the press, we instructed our citizen journalists to steer clear of the horse race and the top-down coverage that dominates the mainstream press.”

For anyone interested in the decline of newspapers and how journalism will morph into the future you could do worse than follow Rosen. Insights like this are worth following him for – another tweet of his – “In 1976, 27% had a great deal of confidence in our press; in 2006, 4.5% did. During this time journalists became far more educated. So: WTF?”

Get Off The Bus is a must read too.

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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.