The other day I had the distinct pleasure of speaking with Peter Rojas, co-founder of Engadget and Joystiq, and formerly editorial director at Gizmodo.
Although our conversation initially focused on the most, and least, successful ways for marketers and PR folk to work with bloggers, we ended up covering a lot of ground including the new Radiohead release, the blurry line between producers and consumers in an era of unlimited digital manipulation, the evolving concept of "nature," and the mass media's "sovereignty over consciousness."
To listen to our conversation, you can use the device pictured here:
There are some hidden gems in this podcast. Once it's loaded, feel free to fast-forward to the following treasures:
18:42 - On Radiohead's "brilliant, smart, well-played gimmick"
27:09 - Young people and the infinitely manipulable digital world
29:49 - The changing idea of the "natural"
32:38 - On starting the next "YouTube-Facebook-Microsoft-Google"
You can download this episode along with other Talent Blog podcasts from Switchpod
or iTunes.
Paul's book is an insightful, articulate, and information-rich overview of the new social media from blogs to YouTube and beyond. If you are a marketer and want to figure out how you can succeed in the new media landscape, or at least avoid some of its precipitous pitfalls, you should tune into the webcast and check out The New influencers.
As an added bonus, I recorded an interview with one of the influencers Paul profiles, Peter Rojas of engadget fame. I will be posting the interview as a podcast here tomorrow. I beg of you to do us both a favor and come on back to listen to it. You'll be glad you did.
I was checking out the buzz log over at Yahoo! and came across this ominously titled post, "The Webkinz Will Rise," about the collectible and cuddly phenomenon known as Webkinz. Apparently, "Webkinz" ranks in the top 100 searches on Yahoo! and buzz about the Webkinz.com site has increased tenfold over the last 12 months.
For those of you who don't know, Webkinz are stuffed animals, kind of like Beanie Babies, only bigger, and each one comes with a special code that you can use to visit your new "pet" on-line, buy stuff for it, dress it up, etc.
I refer to Webkinz and their world as "advertainment" because, well, that's what it is! The Webkinz animal gives you access to the Webkinz world, which is a multi-faceted, immersive commercial for Webkinz. In this way, it resembles the Pokemon revolution of 1995, when Nintendo created a video game that became a card game, a comic, a cartoon, a vast collectible menagerie, and a huge merchandising franchise. In a Leibnizian twist, every part of the Pokemon universe became an advertisement for every other part of it.
It shows how out of the mainstream I am that I stumbled upon the Live Earth global concert extravaganza pretty much by accident Saturday night. I tuned in to the live concert stream via the Live Earth MSN site, and though I was viewing the feed in lowly Safari (yes, some people still use it!), I was able to catch some (to may tastes "underwhelming") performances. I'm an old fuddy-duddy, music-wise.
Live Earth, "The Concerts for a Climate in Crisis," were far more interesting to me in concept then in reality. Billed by its promoters as an event that "that will bring together more than 100 music artists and 2 billion people to trigger a global movement to solve the climate crisis," it apparently set a new record "by generating more than 9 million Internet streams." Even if that number fell short of the billions promised, it is still impressive and highlights the "world-wide-ness" of the web. Before the web, ubiquitous broadband, etc., the idea of a global concert actively viewed by millions would have been impossible. Now it's yesterday's news.
Even more fascinating than the global reach of the web, however, is its long temporal arm (or tail, as some would have it). The record broken by Live Earth had been set by Live8, which found that the majority of its streaming traffic, to the tune of 100 million streams, came during the six weeks after the event. Accordingly, the Live Earth folk expect 80% of their traffic to be post-hoc.
The fact that this live event will enjoy an extended lifespan thanks to the web, and that in fact 80% of its life will take place there, illustrates one way that web-based projects never-end. This point was made quite articulately by Gerry McGovern the other day in an essay he posted with the catchy title, "The Web is messy." It is the temporal open-endedness of the web that makes it messy. It goes on forever! A website is not like a commercial or a brochure that is completed and sent to make its merry way in the world. It is more literally like a living place that is changed by its visitors and occupants and must evolve to meet their needs and expectations.
As any parent can tell you - living things are pretty messy. Live events are as well - just ask the folks who had to clean up after the concert-goers on Saturday. Indeed, Live Earth was criticized for the energy required to put on the actual concerts, especially given the fact that some performers (referred to as, " The artists formerly known as huge carbon footprints," by Marina Hyde in The Guardian) flew private jets "halfway across the world to play," as the New York Times reported.
Is the next step for "green" activism a totally web-based, non-stop musical experience? Why not create a virtual, streaming concert made up of great live footage from bands of yesteryear? Wait, wait, I got it. How about "Second Live Earth"?
A friend of mine passed this link along to me. It is a video of a software demo at the TED Conference back in March. The speaker is Blaise Aguera y Arcas who was demoing two software packages - Seadragon, which is used to browse large amounts of visual data, and Photosynth, which organizes pictures into navigable, 3-D spaces.
This stuff really has to be seen to be believed. It represents the future of how we will interact with visual data and also highlights that we are already creating virtual models of the world we live in by uploading content to websites like Flickr. There is also a cool example of an explorable, high resolution advertisement for Honda. Imagine if a picture in a magazine contained the richness of data you could find on an entire website. Mind-boggling.
Microsoft acquired Seadragon back in February. Aguera y Arcas makes a funny comment about that when people start clapping at the amazing things he's showing them. Have you ever attended a software demo where people burst into spontaneous applause?
I attended a workshop yesterday produced by the Nonprofit Marketing Group of the Boston Chapter of the American Marketing Association called, "Wikis and Podcasts and Blogs, Oh My!" The workshop was run by David Galiel of Public Interest Entertainment Corporation, a nonprofit, open source digital entertainment studio, and Carrie Stack of the Say Yes Institute.
The workshop made it clear that there is a lot in the Web 2.0 world that nonprofits can "profit" from, such as using wikis as an inexpensive, collaborative tool for writing grants and project management, or blogs as an alternate PR channel. It also made it clear that, like many organizations in the "for-profit" world, folks in the nonprofit world are still learning how to make the most of these emerging and very powerful social technologies.
Which means that people interested in using these new technologies, or learning more about how to use them, may want to consider doing so in the context of working for a nonprofit. As Holly Goodrich pointed out when I spoke with her, one benefit of working for a nonprofit is that, due to lamentable understaffing, you usually aren't pigeonholed into one particular role there. On the contrary, you can actually play a lot of different roles and do a lot of different things, such as experimenting with these great, new tools for organizing people and distributing information.
Aside from the above, the workshop also introduced me to this cool video about the new media:
In December I wrote a post about blogs as the new resume in response to something I had read on a blog called "Servant of Chaos." I stated then, as I still believe now, that a blog can function as an annotated resume or portfolio, and it might even be easier and cheaper to construct or maintain than a portfolio website. I even recently reiterated my views here.
Turns out that I'm not the only person who holds these views by a longshot. First, though I cannot now recall how, I was alerted to a post, "5 steps to let your dream job find you," on the Marketing Nirvana blog maintained by LinkedIn's Community Evangelist, Mario Sundar. That post pointed me to a post by Adam Darowski called "The Blog is the New Resume." That piece unleashed a lengthy discussion (the preceding link will actually take you to a roundup of that discussion), demonstrating that a lot of folks have an opinion on this matter.
Reading through these various posts and round-ups I was struck not so much by the sound advice or the reasonable differences of opinions on display ("blogs are resumes," "blogs are NOT resumes," "your vanity Google search is your new business card," etc.) but by something that Immanuel Kant referred to as the "mathematical sublime." For Kant, the mathematical sublime, in contrast to the "dynamic sublime," which we encounter in natural wonders such as Niagara Falls, consisted in reason being overwhelmed by unfathomable quantity.
"Overwhelmed by unfathomable quantity" pretty much describes my daily experience as a blogger. How do others cope with this frightening and alluring experience of sublimity?
Is it wise that I encourage others to cast their career ambitions into this roaring and incomprehensible torrent?
Maintaining a blog can be hard work. You have to stay current; you have to be original; you have to "participate in the conversation." Still, you're in control. You know who your audience is (or is supposed to be), you know what you've written, and you know what's worked and what hasn't.
Even though guest blogging might seem somewhat easier, I think it's actually harder, especially when you are writing for a blog that has a lot of other contributors. In a way, such a blog is like a microcosm of the blogosphere. While, in the grand scheme of all things "blog," you might be writing the exact same thing as some other blogger, chances are, no one will notice. More importantly, YOU won't even notice, because you can't possibly be reading all blogs all the time.
Not so when guest blogging with a bunch of others. Case in point: As I've mentioned, I'm a "guest" on the "Notes on Design" blog over at sessions.edu. Well, the other day I wrote a post strongly stating that designers should create blogs as an alternative to creating a portfolio. Then I read through some previous posts from my co-guests and discovered that Ilise Benun had written a similar post just the day before. To make matters worse, her post was more reasonable and, frankly, better than my own!
I decide I'm going to go in a different direction and talk about the state of branding today. As an example, I'm going to write about my experience shopping for a guitar and trying to shake the spell cast on me by the Gibson brand when I was a teenage Jimmy Page worshipper.
Before I start, like a good guest, I head over to sessions.edu to find out what others are writing about. Sure enough, the first post I read, by John Kuraoka, is about branding! I then write a post about my total lack of original thought-content but it is, quite appropriately, rejected by the editor. "Woe," as they say, "is me."
If there is any lesson to be learned here it is this: Whatever you want to blog about has already been blogged about somewhere else.
If there is another lesson it is this: Never read any blog but your own. You'll always be the first to post on something there!
I haven't written about Second Life in a while and, truth be told, I haven't been "in-world" in a while either, but, thanks to the eclectic, ubiquitous, and industrious link-gathering of Joseph Jaffe, my interest in Second Life goings-on was recently rekindled.
First of all, Jaffe leads us to this post on Greg Verdino's blog about a social media marketing campaign being run by Coke. Read through the comments if you want a good overview of the kinds of debates raging around "new marketing," Consumer Generated Content, and corporate behemoths.
Jaffe also highlights a very comprehensive post on "alternatives to Second Life." If you are curious about the possibilities of the metaverse, what's out there, what could be out there, pro's and con's of this or that virtual world, AND you don't have time to actually visit them all, this is a very thoughtful, informative, and measured overview.
Back in the days when I was teaching newbies at Aquent about the Web, they would ask, "What's your favorite website?" I would respond, "Amazon.com." I wasn't joking. I've visited Amazon.com thousands of times because, as I've written before, I find it easy to use, informative, and, ultimately, valuable.
I know I'm dating myself when I say this, but I still buy music, and Amazon has an incredibly broad and, at times, surprising eclectic selection. What's more, the site boasts a ton of user-generated content that, as marketers would say, "influences my buying behaviors," by making me aware of music I've never heard of and providing lengthy comments on what's good and what's not.
Apparently, I'm not alone. A recent article in Brandweek reported that, "One in three Internet users report their purchase decisions are influenced by sites with social content, Amazon being the most influential." Interestingly enough, this finding can be found in a survey on consumer use of social networking sites conducted by iProspect and JupiterResearch. Who knew that Amazon.com was a social networking site and more influential than MySpace?
Oddly enough, I didn't. Even though I am aware that Amazon allows you to create profiles replete with "friends," I didn't immediately see its kinship with MySpace and Facebook. I believe this is due to the fact that what I find most valuable on Amazon are the user reviews and lists, which are primarily about the products, not the users compiling them. If you want to get to know people (or at least know "of" them), you go to MySpace or Facebook. If you want to know what people think about things you're interested in, you go someplace like Amazon.
The aforementioned survey also showed that although MySpace was visited by a whopping 68% of 18-24-year-olds, only 12% of all Internet users visit it on a daily basis. Compare this to the 40% who visit Yahoo! every day. This explains something about the popularity of Amazon. In effect, Amazon works like an annotated search engine for particular product niches; you can't find everything there, but you can find, and learn about, a lot of certain things.
I've said it before and I'll say it again. "Explorability" makes sites attractive and generates repeat visits. Harnessing the power of these visitors to add unlimited content to your site perpetually increases its explorability. While Yahoo! facilitates exploration of the Web in general, and MySpace relies on users to create an explorable community, Amazon strives for and achieves something else: a virtually endless marketplace in which a community of explorers help one another, and the 90% who don't actively contribute, discover what their looking for.
As a colleague and I were sitting down to discuss what, if anything, Aquent could do in Second Life at this late date, he glumly informed me that TMP Worldwide just opened a recruiting office in Second Life. He was kind of bummed because, well, we're kind of in the recruiting business and it sort of felt like they had beaten us to the (virtual) punch.
I dug into this a little bit and things weren't quite as bad as they seemed. TMP Worldwide is a recruitment advertising company, strictly speaking, and, if I've understood their press release correctly, they've established a service for recruiters in Second Life. Specifically, they've built "TMP Island," a place where "recruiters will be able to network with prospective candidates, host events, conduct employee presentations, and even build virtual replicas of their real-world offices for unprecedented interaction with job seekers."
As the Reuters bureau in Second Life reported, this unprecedented interaction will consist of "An avatar -- or online character -- of a real corporate recruiter [interviewing] avatars of job seekers, using instant- messaging technology."
Look, I'm in no position to second guess the business decisions of gigantic (erstwhile "Monster-ous") multinationals like TMP, especially given my own erstwhile giddy boosterism a few months back. But when I read in their press release that Second Life is "currently inhabited by roughly 3.4 million residents," it made me think that the folks at TMP either haven't looked at the Second Life homepage, which would have told them that, at least as I write this, only 23,000 "residents" "currently" "inhabit" this virtual world, (to be fair, 1.1 million have logged in over the last two months, though it's unclear exactly what that means), or aren't aware of the quite reasonable skepticism (to cite but one example) expressed about the real-world potential of this virtual one.
I know, I know. Nay-saying and cynical sniping is easy. But the fact of the matter is that Second Life, while very intriguing conceptually, can be frustrating to interact with in reality, is plagued by technical problems (just check out Second Life Insider where you could have read on Monday, "The day was plagued with the same massive problems from yesterday. That's nearly 60,000 unhappy new signups, assuming they all even got a chance to log in."), and, frankly, not anywhere near as popular as World of Warcraft.
Seriously, are recruiters and candidates really going to want to face precipitous learning curves and lurking technical uncertainties just to conduct an "unprecedented" interview with candidates via IM?
Marketing and creative careers are increasingly "impacted," as some like to say, by the social networking phenomenon. On the one hand, marketers are called on to figure out strategies that take advantage of the potential offered by social networking sites from LinkedIn to YouTube to MySpace. On the other hand, marketers and creatives are called on to design, develop and market new social networking sites for companies as diverse as Nike, Wal-Mart and Air France-KLM. In fact, the proliferation of social networking sites led Ellen Sheng to lament in this WSJ article [registration required], "The social-networking bandwagon is getting awfully crowded."
I was wondering about the reasons behind this and I think I came up with something [Alert the media!], thanks in part to Nigel Hollis of Millward Brown. Last October he wrote a post on his blog entitled, "Is your brand a party animal?" and his main argument, rather loosely paraphrased, was that most brands were too boring, conservative, or self-centered to succeed in the social media space. He used the analogy of a party to drive his point home. The popular people at a party are those who are engaging and entertaining, and the same goes for the popular "people" (i.e., those with a million friends) on MySpace, for example.
Could it be that companies start their own social networking sites because they know their brands would be unpopular on the sites that already exist? Probably not. I would guess that the motives are actually more selfish than that: Companies start their own social networking sites because they want to aggregate their customers, gather information from them, and present them with more targeted promotions and products.
Two questions present themselves: "Who will develop the simple, plug-and-play, out-of-the-box social networking site development kit?" and, "Who will launch the social networking site for people who want to or have already launched social networking sites?"
Blogging is not only good for your career, it can be a lot like recess in elemetary school!
For instance, just the other day I got tagged by the original Aquent blogger, Tim Donnelly (who himself had been tagged by the illustrious Heather Hamilton at Microsoft).
For those who don't know, there's this sort of chain-blogging thing going on where a blogger will write 5 things about him- or herself and then "tag" 5 other bloggers. This game of tag has been underway for several weeks now and I keep stumbling across it as I cruise the marketing blogosphere.
One of the most interesting responses I found comes courtesy of Peter Kim at Forrester Research. In part, his decision to participate was driven by feedback that they had received suggesting that Forrester's Marketing Blog should have a more personal voice. Referring to the spread of the tagging meme, he writes, "These posts demonstrate a best practice in corporate blogging - humanizing the digital experience."
Wanting as I do to be on the forefront of corporate blogging, to participate in "the conversation," and to raise my blog's human personality quotient, I've decided to participate as well. Here are 5 more or less career-related things "you" don't know about me:
1) Years ago I had a temp assignment in the complaints department of a large processed foods company. One day someone sent in a dried lizard in a plastic baggy. They claimed to have found it in their raisins.
2) Two summers running I had a job laminating Denny's menus.
3) I had a temporary assignment at a law office where my task was typing up college applications for the daughter of one of the partners. The irony was that I had just interviewed for a faculty position at one of the universities.
4) I drove an airport shuttle van for about six months. I had applied with a friend from college and at the orientation on the first day we met another guy who had gone to school with us. His only comment was, "So, the study of philosophy has brought us to this."
5) I was once in a rock band called "Spanking Machine."
Since this virus has spread pretty far already, I may be hard-pressed to find 5 bloggers who haven't been tagged yet. Here goes anyhow. Hopefully they will have the time and interest to respond:
"As a result of the growing popularity of consumer-generated pictures, videos and e-mail messages on Internet sites like YouTube and Myspace, advertisers are getting consumers to essentially do their jobs for them."
The above quote may be found in this article [registration required] from the New York Times. It focuses on the emergence of Times Square as "a publishing platform," as Peter Stabler, director of communication strategy for Goodby, Silverstein and Partners puts it. In brief, thanks to the ubiquity of digital cameras and the rise of user-generated and social networking sites, marketers are finding that "experiential marketing" (or what used to be called "publicity stunts"), such as Charmin's fancy public restrooms, are growing long legs on the Web. These restrooms alone, "[u]sed by thousands in Times Square [were] viewed by 7,400 Web users on one site alone."
While this raises a lot of interesting questions about the meaning of "product placement" and whether or not advertisers should start courting, and compensating, particularly popular or prolific private citizens for featuring their products on Flickr and YouTube, I was particularly struck by the formulation "getting consumers to essentially do their jobs for them." Now it is certainly the case that YouTubers and Flickr-ers are, wittingly or un, doing things that benefit advertisers and the brands they promote. But so is anyone wearing a t-shirt with a visible logo.
It is not the job of advertisers to wander around the city in sandwich boards; it is their job, however, to come up with novel ways of getting brand-specific messages out to the world. If they create a spectacle noteworthy enough to generate spontaneous buzz promoted by random individuals, then they have done exactly what they are supposed to do. In fact, by now, I'd be astonished if the folks who conceived of and executed these events weren't planning on a significant "web" effect. In a sense, if no one had posted this stuff to the Web, then you could rightly accuse advertisers of shirking.
Or do I, and not the paper of record, not understand what advertisers are supposed to do?
After writing about Second Life on Friday, I came across two interesting references to it from a marketing perspective.
First, Max Kalehoff cited a Wall Street Journal story about the marketing strategy for Toyota's Scion brand on his blog. In addition to highlighting Scion's move away from televsion advertising as well as their decision to scale back production in order to keep the brand "special," the WSJ article also mentioned that they are moving their "online social-networking marketing focus" from myspace.com to Second LIfe. WSJ says that Scion made this move because they want to be "up to the moment and beyond." I say, "Don't we all?"
Secondly, I was perusing the latest issue of Fast Company and discovered this article on viral marketing. The focus of the article is a firm called Campfire that specializes in engineering viral campaigns. Campfire, which was founded by a couple of the guys who worked on The Blair Witch Project, has already had success creating viral advertainment for Sega and Audi and has now been tapped by Pontiac and Leo Burnett to help them "build a community around the carmaker in Second Life."
Community is key to being viral in at least three ways:
1. You need to immerse yourself in the target community before releasing your marketing pathogen.
For example, while developing their Sega campaign, they hung out on gamer fan sites and message boards to learn the lingo and identify opinion makers to whom they "leaked" bootleg versions of the game they were promoting.
2. Don't piss off the target community.
The quickest way to do that is to make them feel like they are a target community. The other way is to violate communal conventions or traditions. Campfire pointed out to Leo Burnett, for example, that one car manufacturer who had tried to gain traction in Second Life annoyed long-time users by giving away cars for free, thus wrecking the market for established, in-world carmakers.
3. A virus creates a community.
This community consists of the people who "catch" the virus. In order to grow this community, you will not only need content that draws people in, you will also need to cultivate a rank of "hardcore" participants who will actively generate interest in it. In fact, you might have to invent such fans to push things (just make sure you don't violate Rule #2), as Campfire did for one of their campaigns.
The idea of "viral marketing" is itself a kind of virus and infected marketers, specifically those, as the FC article points out, who talk about campaigns being viral before they've even launched, need to be reminded and warned: You don't make the campaign viral. Far from it.
Just as "it takes a village to raise a child," never forget that it takes a community to spread a virus.
I created a Second Life avatar a couple weeks ago and entered this strange, surprising, and sometimes frustrating virtual world. Since then, I've become obsessed with it and, as my friends and coworkers will tell you, I can't stop talking about it. I'm not the only one. In addition to a detailed overview and "Travel Guide" published in the October issue of Wired (very helpful to the "noob," I must say) and a recent spate of stories on NPR, just today this rather thought-provoking editorial by Fortune's Senior Editor, David Kirkpatrick entitled, "No, Second Life is not overhyped," appeared.
Kirkpatrick's main thesis is that Second Life actually delivers on the promise of all social networking sites (and a number of cyberpunk novels like Neuromancer and Snow Crash): to provide web users with a complex, visually interesting, intensely interactive environment. The Web continues to rely on a text-layout metaphor even if motion pictures and music happened to be embedded in it. Case in point: as "rich" (or hideous) as it may be, your profile on MySpace is still called a "page." By allowing users to create involving, 3-D "places," Second Life provides a complex and seemingly inexhaustible alternative to the traditional presentation of information, and content in general, an alternative that is looking more and more like the Shape of Things to Come.
Second Life may not be THE future, but it certainly represents it (in every sense of the word). Numerous brands have already staked out territory there (Sony, Wells Fargo Bank, Duran Duran), and more are exploring this new world's possibilities everyday. Since these possibilities are practically infinite - Second Life allows you to create and program the objects one encounters in its servers - there is a growing need for marketing and design consultancies capable of helping clients "understand and harness the power of virtual worlds," as one such firm, Millions of Us, puts it.
Launched by two former employees of Linden Lab, the company behind Second Life, Millions of Us already boasts clients like Toyota, Sun Microsystems, and Warner Brothers. And they are far from alone. Another firm, Crayon, has not only started a business aimed at marketing in Second Life, but is actually headquartered in Second Life! (Admittedly, they do have a street address in New York for the time being). Crayon is apparently gaining traction on the splotchily rendered terrain of Second Liife, having most recently introduced a little soft drink called Coca Cola into it.
Which is just to say that anyone who is curious about the direction that marketing to social networks is taking avoids Second Life at their cost. Channel proliferation has posed increasingly daunting challenges to marketers for over a decade now but Second Life ups the ante significantly because, more than just a new channel unto itself, it effectively constitutes a parallel universe duplicating the channels in this one and then inventing new ones.
Moreover, Second Life is the living embodiment of a world ruled by design. Every aspect of it from the leaves on trees to the creases in your avatar's face have actually BEEN designed, either by the original creators or by the ever-growing number of residents. It's not only interesting to find out that Wired, CNET, Reuters all have offices in Second Life, it emphasizes the ongoing and growing need for people who can design and create these virtual spaces (not to mention that the somewhat modified laws of physics add new and unexpected dimensions to "real world" professions like interior design and architecture). And as far as interactive design is concerned, since developing clothing, buildings, and bodies for Second Life requires both visual intelligence and programming ingenuity, it stands as this discipline's veritable apotheosis!
But don't just take my word for it. Become a resident (basic membership is free) and literally see for yourself.
The other day I had the distinct pleasure of speaking with Peter Rojas, co-founder of Engadget and Joystiq, and formerly editorial director at Gizmodo.
