DOUG SCHUMACHER

experience designer + writer

Fascinating

Creativing :: iPhone is #1 on Flickr, crasher squirrels, and a lot of funky new tech

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My weekly update of what’s going on in new media marketing, pulled from social bookmarking site Creativing.com:

iPhone to Become #1 Camera on Flickr

I don’t take this as so much a testament to the greatness of the iPhone camera as much as the power of convenience. In the same way the ‘always on’ aspect of broadband was probably even more powerful than the bandwidth speed, the ‘always with you’ aspect of mobile phone cameras means exponentially more photo opps. Or at least perceived photo opps.

Upload Your Songs and See If You’ve Got a Hit!

This sounds space age, but I’m pretty doubtful that we’ve gotten this far with AI yet that a computer can tell you how big of a hit your home-brewed mp3 is going to be. Or more likely, not. I’m going to get a musician friend of mine to try this (i.e., someone who could upload something that won’t crash the computer).

8 Facebook Applications Now Accepting Facebook Credits

They’re mostly games right at the moment. However, the story isn’t about who’s doing this now, but rather where this will go now that 3rd parties can use the Facebook ‘credits’ platform. I think there’s going to be a lot of interesting opportunities for brands in this area. It might not be a new line of business, but if they can inject their dwindling marketing budgets with bits of revenue, I think they’ll jump at it.

Top 10 Crasher Squirrels

You’ve probably heard the story about the Crasher Squirel at Banff National Park. These are some of the funnier pics on this photo meme.

Google Forced to Reveal Identity of Offensive Blogger

Last week’s “On The Media” podcast covered this exact issue, and the consensus was that brands, including Google, are backed by the courts in not pulling offensive comments about another person. And the courts were backing them. This changes that considerably, but also opens up what would seem to be a titanic can of worms. If saying something offensive and incorrect online means legal action, the lawyers must be parading in the streets.

Translation Party

Aptly titled. Enter your phrase and this will translate it into Japanese, back to English, then to Japanese again, and finally English. It’s a good example of the difference between translating and interpreting. Also, a cautionary tale against using any of the auto-translator tools.

Graphic Data with Design

Regular readers will know I have a thing about data visualization. It dates back to my earliest days of subscribing to Wired, I’m sure. These are excellent examples of how data can be made to look anything but drab.

Click and Draw to Navigate

Then there’s my interest in navigation. In particular I like the cummulative visited link approach. It really makes sense, and seems so obvious I’m surprised it hasn’t been used before (that I know of).

Creativing :: YouTube educates reporters, more proof of Facebook’s impact, and mobile continues building momentum

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My weekly update of what’s going on in new media marketing, pulled from social bookmarking site Creativing.com:

YouTube – reporterscenter’s Channel

I mentioned YouTube going local with video news reportage last week. This is a support site providing tips for those content producers. Smart way to increase quality of content and build community.

Facebook Search Improved for Everyone

With the attempt at buying Twitter and then acquiring FriendFeed, Facebook has made it clear they’re serious about real-time search. When I think about how often I’ve seen something on Facebook and couldn’t find later to reference, I don’t think there’s any question this is going to be a great improvement. And Facebook’s highly-customizable privacy settings are part of the capabilities: I’m  convinced online privacy issues are going to be major. But most importantly, there’s little doubt at this point about the value of friend and network-based information. With Google search results, it’s a great place to start researching a product or service, but certainly not conclusive or that trustworthy. That gave way to user reviews like Amazon and Yelp. But we’ve seen how easily those can be gamed. The value of being able to rely on people you know and trust is obvious. It’s also interesting to see a marketing tactic come along that’s closer to the purchase decision point than Google Adwords: Assuming marketers have been able to get into those search results. And therein lies the greatest potential of social media.

Facebook’s Click-Through Rates Flourish … for Wall Posts

On the subject of the value of friend referrals: Striking new data out on how people respond to Facebook wall posts. Apparently, quite well. Of course it matters what’s in that wall post, but the online world hasn’t seen 2-40% click-through rates since oh, maybe the first banner in 1994? Of course I have to cringe at seeing the CTR as the metric of evaluation. This is a mixed bag. Social media needs metrics to convince a large number of CMOs, according to a recent survey. Yet the click-through dragged online marketing’s branding potential down to a DR mindset from which it’s never fully recovered. I’d like to think marketers are more sophisticated about the online space at this point, but when the battle is between clearly-defined data like the CTR and more nebulous inferred data, the case is anything but closed.

“Augmented Reality” Is Also A Form Of Search

Search is quickly becoming a lot more than typing a few keywords into a search engine. From voice driven search to location based filters to augmented reality interfaces, it’s good to keep in mind that people are finding out about information in continually-diverse ways. The mobile phone has already driven much of this, and we’re only in Act 1 for that technology. Given that search in whatever form it’s employed is so central to a campaign’s performance, it’s not something creative marketers can ignore.

Chris and Malcolm are both wrong | A continuing discussion about freemium content

Great expansion on the debate between Chris Anderson of Wired and Malcolm Gladwell of Outliers on whether or not the future of content is free or paid. This post, by Brad Burnham, Fred Wilson’s partner at Union Square Ventures, sees truths and flaws in both views. At some point, the whole discussion moves into a debate about the economics of abundance, particularly in terms of content development. It’s ultimately a debate about the scarcity of resources, which has been written about as early as 1971.

From the post:

“In a world where facts are readily available, from multiple sources, basic information will be commoditized. But the explosion of sources will create a real burden for the consumers of information. Raw information will become not just a commodity, it will be a nuisance. In that world, consumers will value scarce, relevant insight over abundant facts.”

An interesting point is that users of a site like Facebook, or even Twitter, are not just using the system. They’re adding value to it. They’re the filters that help people sift through the mass of information being created. So should every user of Facebook or Twitter be paid?

Need to Deposit a Check? Try Your iPhone

I’m all over this. Take a photo of your check and email it in. Get the deposit. Destroy the original check. It seems fraught with fraud opportunities, yet the cashed check always leads back to an account that someone has set up with identifying information that banks have to be vigilant on. There’s no question they’ve thought that part of it through. I hate using cash because it means going to ATMs, and only periodic checks aren’t auto deposited. We’re getting closer and closer to never having to go into a bank. Which has to be a big help to their profitability.

Wells Fargo Labs

Given the previous link, no wonder Well Fargo has a Lab. This is their attempt to create what Seth Godin calls a purple cow. Adding the remarkable to a product or service. Give people something to talk about (presumably on their social network sites). For many companies, this is the new marketing.

LocaModa – Mobile posting to Out-Of-Home displays

The concept of posting to a large public display from a mobile phone has been done before, but now it’s transitioning from a customized experience to something you can buy more like media placements. Wiffiti is another player in this space.

ddɐ ʞooqǝɔɐɟ ʇxǝʇʎɯdılɟ s,ʎɹɹǝɾ & uǝq

Thought this was a fun app, by Ben & Jerry’s. Simple, intriguing, and highly visual. This technique was used on IMs a year or so ago, but with social media now hitting on all cylinders, there are still legs in the idea.

Thinking Space

With so much emphasis on social media, a lot of the attention in marketing has moved away from Flash. And certainly the large Flash sites of the past 5 years. But Flash can create powerful experiences, now more than ever. This is an exceptionally clean site that combines what few sites can: A beautiful, elegant and distinct navigation that’s also intuitive.

Creativing :: New ad formats, the end of privacy as we know it, and YouTube gets local with the news

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My weekly update of what’s going on in new media marketing, pulled from social bookmarking site Creativing.com:

Is Persistence the Key to Web Branding?

A number of ad networks are working on display ad models where they keep the same ad on the page for a much longer duration. I like this change of focus. Publishers have been going for quantity – trying to show as many ads as possible – instead of going for quality. Literally running viewers through a more cuircuitous path than necessary, to increase impression counts. The net effect is people are exposed to a lot of messages they can’t recall, versus something they can’t forget. Hopefully this, combined with larger ad sizes, will give publishers the boost in revenues they need.

Ads Follow Web Users, and Get Deeply Personal

Speaking of publishers needing to monetize their traffic. This is about the merging of online and offline data. The creep factor on this is that the offline data companies like Experian have such extensive demographic information about us – like home value, credit rating, the car we drive – and the online tracking companies have a lot of behavioral data based on how we’re moving around the web and the sites we visit. Put those two together, and you have an intensely personal profile available to marketers. Bring in Facebook profile info, and you also have a lot of information about personal taste and interests. This merger is possible due to cookies, of course. In the past, tracking via the so-called 3rd party cookies has been tolerated because of it’s anonymity. They knew a lot about the sites you were visiting and the ads you responded to, but little else. But now, all of this data comes together: With your name and social security number attached. On one hand, I’ll be shocked if there isn’t a big backlash in the near future about the amount of information available to marketers. On the other hand, in a terrible economy with an already-struggling ad model, tracking is a huge factor in serving effective ads that can be sold at rates the publishers desperately need.

False online reviews draw suit from NY

This story should rip through the social media community. The NY Attorney General settled a law suit with a cosmetic surgery company for posting fake product reviews online. While this should be good news for the social media marketing community at large, it does seem to open up a big can of worms. I mean, Amazon is full of fake book reviews. Yelp has a lot of suspicious restaurant reviews. In a social media world where everyone is a brand with the potentail to be a pitchman, this should get interesting, and certainly complicated from a legal standpoint. But this really underscores the power of social media in general. When people lost trust in corporations, they trusted other humans, even if they didn’t know them. With that relationship in question, the most reliable and trustworthy product information they’ll have will be their friends and their network.

Izea Launches Sponsored Tweets

Is there a difference between a company paying an unknown individual to write a positive review and a company paying a well-known individual to write a positive review? In this case, I think there is. For one, you have full-disclosure with the Izea posts. And someone who’s writing career is based on credibility does have to maintain certain standards. Some people see this as a pact with the devil, but with bloggers needing to pay the rent just like their newspaper counterparts, I’m sure this will only increase in popularity.

Go Cloud, Young Man

A good explanation from a range of perspectives on the impact of cloud computing. While the overarching tone is opportunity, it’s lace with dire warnings about pending changes in business.

Now on YouTube – Local News

The new section on YouTube is titled “News Near You”, and it serves up videos from your area, based on your IP address. They’re getting some local TV stations to participate, and doing a rev share deal with them on ad sales. But of course, with citizen journalism getting easier and easier – the new iPhone video cam actually has a ‘send to YouTube’ button to post in 1 click – some news organizations are understandably concerned. If news scrapes, blogs, and RSS did in newspapers, how  different is this as a replacement for local news on TV? And I’d say that video is a more easily replaced form or reportage than articles.

Inside Best Buy’s Augmented-Reality Ad

You’ve probably seen various forms of AR, or augmented reality, where you print out a piece of paper and hold it up to your computer camera and voila, something that looks like a hologram comes into view on your computer screen. Overall, this seemed to work very well for them. But I think there’s a big first mover advantage to new technologies like this. After the first wave, expect response rates to drop, and certainly the press will stop covering them.

Beauty Of New Technology: Users Personalize Before-And-After Ads

There’s no shortage of examples of places you can insert a headshot of yourself, and suddenly you’re a pirate. Or a Transformer. Or a Simpson. Etc. Etc. This is taking that idea and applying it to products as a way of reviewing them. At first glance, this looks pretty cheesey. But don’t underestimate people’s interest in seeing themselves within the context of a new product they’re considering purchasing. Even if it’s very crude.

Seth’s Blog: When tactics drown out strategy

A good reminder that just because you can do things quickly in new media doesn’t mean you should.

Cool Navigation

A photography site is a challenge for navigation, because it’s a bit hard to describe a photographer’s style, especially in the few words that navigation requires. So in this case, they simply used photos. A nice way of using a standard like navigation in a fresh way that enhances the experience.

Creativing :: Catching crooks with an iPhone, YouTube makes bands money, and a Twitter post leads to a lawsuit

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My weekly update of what’s going on in new media marketing, pulled from social bookmarking site Creativing.com:

I now pronounce you monetized: a YouTube video case study

You’ve seen the JK Wedding Entrance Dance video, now read the case study. This is what YouTube and everyone else who isn’t a record label has been saying for years. That associating your music with emotionally-powerful user-generated content is good for sales, not fleecing the artists. Labels should be thankful they don’t have to a) pay people for developing this content, b) spend the money to drive the traffic to support 10 million views, and c) pay the video streaming bandwidth fees.

New Report Suggests Facebook Has Replaced Email For Sharing Content

I’ve previously reported on how Facebook is driving sharing and traffic, but here’s additional proof. What’s particularly reinforcing is that the two sharing apps have such similar data. Perhaps most telling about the power of Facebook and community in general is that they’re driving all this sharing, and their email app pretty much sucks.

Southern Comfort Pours Entire Media Budget Into Digital

Yep, the whole enchilada. I can’t recall a major brand that’s made that leap yet. And this from a distiller in Kentucky, no less. Their logic is right on. If you want to sell to the people going out to clubs and purchasing spirit-based drinks, the Web is a great place to be.

Tweet Sentiments – Know Who’s Tweeting About What When Where & How

Probably more fun than functional at the moment, but pulling sentiment data out of massive text chunks is going to be huge for both target marketing and market research. So not a bad thing to stay on top of.

Twitter post leads to lawsuit

Perhaps inevitable. Chicago apartment management group Horizon is suing a Twitter user for stating their apartment was moldy, on Twitter. Now, they may have a point, but if they settle this at all in their favor, it’s sure to be a Pyrrhic Victory. The woman Twitterer had 20 followers. Just 20. And Horizon went and turned this into a national spectacle. D-U-M-B. Not to mention there must be a zillion companies in the US named Horizon, so even for those searching for Horizon for whatever reason, this Tweet probably would have been buried. Then, in the middle of the media storm, one of Horizon’s owners explains their lawsuit to the Chicago Sun-Times: “We’re a sue-first, ask-questions-later kind of an organization.” D-U-M-B-E-R.

Winery’s ‘dream job’ idea leaves an aftertaste

A winery in NoCal posted a job opening for a “lifestyle correspondent” to spend their days blogging, tweeting, and singing the praises of their winery from beautiful Healdsburg. $60k for 6 months work. Not bad in a bleak economy. And like a good social marketer, they encouraged participants to promote themselves and the brand by soliciting votes. Several social media experts jumped on board, with one amassing far and away the most votes. But the winery didn’t even include him in their top 50 finalists. A social media community backlash ensued. As Digg founder Kevin Rose said: “You can’t ask the community to help you vet candidates and then just disregard what they said”. This campaign was essentially a knock-off, me-too version of the Australian “Best job in the world” campaign from earlier this year. And I think this demonstrates that you can knock off someone elses idea, but that doesn’t mean that you get the idea. And I think it’s especially true in social media that it really helps to understand the emotional dynamic of the campaign you’re running.

Marketers Get Valedictorian to Plug Movie in Speech

A studio pays a high school valedictorian $1800 to mention one of the catch phrases from the movie in her valedictorian graduation address. They video taped it, and then pushed it for viral success. The results? Not much viral activity, and a pissed off school district and high school administration. Personally, I understand the annoyance, in particular bringing commerce into a graduation ceremony like that. But at the end of the day, it’s seems pretty harmless, and a bright student has some additional money, which she’ll certainly need attending MIT.

New York Nearest Subway augmented Reality App for iPhone 3GS

There have been some similar examples of compass and location-based services popping up, and keep in mind this requires the iPhone to be jailbroken. But a great example of where things are headed.

Busted! Thieves Caught by MobileMe’s Find My iPhone

Great story. A 15 yr old and his dad are on a river trip and get back to find their car broken into, and the kid’s iPhone among the stolen items. He had the MobileMe Find My Phone feature, so he got the location and called the cops. Turns out it was a family they’d been trying to nail for a while. Cops arrived and reclaimed the stolen goods and arrested the culprits. Case closed.

Creativing :: ESPN gets local, iPhone games not for every brand, and more fun with Facebook Connect

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My weekly update of what’s going on in new media marketing, pulled from social bookmarking site Creativing.com:

Operating System Interface Design between 1981-2009

This is like taking a walk through the past 20 years of my digital life. Looking at old interfaces like the first Macintosh OS brings early projects and experiences back to mind. It’s notable how today, even the open source systems have a slick look.

ESPN Aims to Be the Home Team, All Over America

So many questions these days about the future of news organizations. Local is undoubtedly a large, uncharted territory online. ESPN is making an interesting run at the sports vertical. Two points I find noteworthy: They’re going down to the high school sports level, and they’re using citizen journalism in the process. While I don’t know the inner workings of the publishing industry, I can imagine that for the average high school sports star, there’s nothing better than being featured on ESPN, no matter what variation of the network it involves.

iPhone Games: Idea Attracts Coke, Audi, but not Many Others

I know I’ve said this before, but iPhone games are a long shot for brands as a mass market vehicle. If you have a specific way of extending your service, then I can see an app that provides utility making sense. But with so many free, and good games out there, pure entertainment is a tough arena to compete in.

Photoshop in movie posters and ads

A fun look at how movie posters go through the Photoshop wringer.

Facebook Now Lets Advertisers Use Your Picture

I’ve been waiting for something along these lines to happen with Facebook Connect. A man is served an ad for a dating service, with a headline “Hot Singles”. The “hot single” featured in the ad? His wife. Facebook has been adding more and more privacy controls, but the default on FB Connect is pretty wide open. And changing the default settings on an app or platform is probably as common as reading the service aggreement before signing up.

Summer At MoMA – Using Facebook Connect to match your interests

I have to follow the train wreck above with a good example of how Facebook Connect should be used. Facebook, of course, has quite a lot of info about each user. Facebook Connect takes the info and contextualizes is across just about any online experience. In this case, MOMA has used your various interests to try and project what art exhibits you’ll most like. It’s not a flawless example, but certainly moving in the right direction.

Does social media really correlate with the bottom line? Color me skeptical

I’m on board with this contrarian view to a research report posted earlier this week (the link to the original report is in the article). Social media is powerful, but this really stretches the correlation between social media action and business success far too thinly, IMO.

MySpace: A Place for Gaming

So, MySpace is getting killed in the social media space, and their resurrection will come in the form of gaming? My only issue with this logic is that by all industry projections I’m aware of, the big growth opportunity in the gaming industry’s future is social gaming. And what’s the dominant platform in social gaming right now? Facebook.

Top 12 Social Gaming Trends

In case you doubt my previous assessment, here are 12 social gaming trends. Note how many of these trends align with Facebook’s features and strengths. Collections and wish lists, gift invites, donations as revenue, virtual goods, using friends’ data, iphone. What I also find interesting is how the campaign ideas we’re coming up with for clients are involving these same types of features. Just as movies and TV shows were often the driving inspiration behind many TV campaigns of the past, games will likely be the driving force for more and more campaigns of the future.

Online gaming: Has Evony become the most despised game on the web?

Ironic that while so many other industries are exploring ways to integrate gaming into their ads, a game campaign resorts to good old T & A as the foundation for their campaign. I too saw these adds all over the Web. The writer speaks about a general migration from more game play-oriented ads, to little more than women’s breasts. My guess is that this is simply campaign optimization. Finding out which ads are working, and going with those. And at the end of the day, the real probably could be that the game just sucks.

Creativing :: Teens say :( to Twitter, debate over ‘the big idea’, and a new global medium … Postcards

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My weekly update of what’s going on in new media marketing, pulled from social bookmarking site Creativing.com:

Why Teens Are Not Using Twitter: It Doesn’t Feel Safe

Some insightful findings from a recent report on how teens are using media. By ‘safe’, they’re referring to knowing who’s reading your posts. Clearly, Facebook’s latest privacy settings are right on the mark. And while the safety thing is big, and something most adults probably overlook, I thought it was ironic that Twitter is seen as expensive. It’s based on the texting charges, which anyone without a smart phone will be hit by when they post. I’d guess it’s the same for Facebook’s status updates, but the bigger point is, when a significant percentage of a group have a strong preference about a communication platform, it makes other platforms pretty irrelevant for that group. Also noteworthy is this post, on TechCrunch, was written by a 16 year old.

The New Online – Keep It Clear

This article reiterates something social media is reminding us on a daily basis. Keep your communications clear. I think this has been a big reality in online for a long time, and social media is perhaps bearing it out more clearly. Consumer’s are both in charge, and impatient. Site usability studies have shown for years that lack of clarity doesn’t breed further investigation, but rather site abandonment. If you can’t get your message across quickly and clearly today, you probably won’t have a message at all.

PR Blackout Challenges Mom Bloggers to Return to Basics

Pretty interesting approach by community MomDot to serve something of a reality check to the mommy blogger group. Essentially drop all paid posting for a week. Paid posting probably won’t be going away, but reminders like this can help bloggers more conscious of why their readers are there in the first place.

The Difference Between Total Users and Active Users

Most sites and web services have far more total users than active users. Writer Fred Wilson states that companies should focus on the active users, making them even more active, than trying to get the non-active users more involved, because over time, many of the non-active users will become active, as they see their friends who are active users getting more involved. This aligns very well with common social media practices. Brands should be focusing on their best customers first. Once they’re on board, then they’ll carry the message on to their friends.

Howcast, a Video Start-Up, Charges Into the ‘How-to’ Web

At first, it doesn’t seem like there’s be room in the crowded video space for a company developing content internally. But these vids are very well done, and are a good reminder that while YouTube may have a lot of HowTo videos, there’s always room for a better product experience.  The branding and styling of the videos are nice, and the production quality is surprisingly good for miniscule budgets.

The Big Idea: Chronicle of a Death Foretold

Good piece on the life or death of ‘the big idea’ in marketing. This subject is as nuanced and fragmented as the marketing industry it’s written about. The truth, as usual, is probably somewhere between the polarities. I don’t think the big idea is dead, but rather we’re looking at a new version of the big idea. Something that has to have a lot more fluidity and scale than anything we considered the big idea in the past.

Web site recreates Apollo 11 mission in real time

On the 40th anniversary of moon shot v1 comes this piece from the JFK Museum: We Choose The Moon. A nice comprehensive piece that seeks to put the moon mission into a more grandiose perspective by going granular. The site is being rolled out in real time sync with the mission timeline. An interesting tactic, although probably not in line with how people consume media these days. Is that part of the retrospective?

Camera screen overlay info for Google Phone – Kicking Reality Up a Notch

Last week I covered new patents being applied for by Apple in which contextual geolocation information is served through a combination of a phone’s camera, GPS coordinate info, and photo recognition technologies. Now here’s a real world example, from The Netherlands. Pretty impressive, and definitely something I’d use.

Postcrossing – Postcards Traveling The World

This is a cool idea. The site matches people from around the world, and initiates a postcard exchange.  A simple yet effective way to connect people in different cultures. Alternately, it’s a bit random, and I think it would be nice to be able to select a country. But a good idea at the core.

Creativing :: Social media strengths and embarrassments, mobile takes off in a million directions, and a Michael Jackson tribute video worth watching

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My weekly update of what’s going on in new media marketing, pulled from social bookmarking site Creativing.com:

90% of Consumers Trust Opinions of Friends

That shouldn’t shock anyone. But it really gains impact when compared to other information sources, especially paid media. The idea of knowing what our friends are doing, and having that steer our own behaviors, is what social media marketing is all about.

Can You Be Friends With Your Mom … On Facebook?

A funny scenario in which a woman struggles with the pros and cons of bringing mom into her Facebook fold, yet a very real situation for many people. As Facebook continues to push for growth and more and more people file in, many are going to be asking how great of a communication tool it is when they’re seemingly communicating with virtually everyone they know at the same time. Sure you can individualize settings for everyone. How many of you have done that? And how long did it take? These are openings for the next Facebook, or Facebooks, serving niches that were lost in Facebook’s growth.

The Facebook Doctrine: Gaming And The Future

I’d normally never post an article this long for a group of marketing people. But it’s a far-reaching discussion with Facebook’s platform manager — one of the main guys making decisions about what Facebook will and won’t be doing, technologically. Social gaming, considered by many as the most exciting thing on gaming’s horizon, is perfectly suited for Facebook’s friendship network. And Facebook Connect simply extends that to experiences to all 3 screens: Computer, TV, and mobile.

British spy chief’s cover blown on Facebook by Reuters

The wife of the head of the British MI6, their secret service, divulged WAY too much family information on Facebook. Incidents like this make me think that there are a lot of people out there who just don’t don’t get what social media is all about. And per above, with more and more ‘older’ people pouring onto Facebook, it’s a bit like running a media gauntlet. It also seem to set the stage for a backlash based around privacy concerns, although in this case, I think it’s just someone who didn’t get the memo on the social aspect of social media.

The Social Media Underground

One of the least-discussed benefits of a great social media campaign is the SEO rewards. There are 3 pillars to SEO: Content, architecture, and links. The link component is often the weakest. And that’s where great social media creative can knock it out of the park. Because good social media is shared. And often that sharing points back to an experience somewhere on the brand site. Each of those inbound links gives a boost to the brand’s Google rankings. As social media matures, more and more companies are going to be trying to generate this type of content. And that’s where creative agencies that understand the medium are going to have an enormous impact on things way beyond brand awareness, the aspect of social media most focused on at the moment.

Viral customer complaint

I love this. A band is flying to a gig on United, and at a stopover in Chicago, they look out the window and to their horror see their instruments being tossed around like a hacky sack. (Just to have a shot of their faces would have been plenty of entertainment for me.) They complain to the flight attendants. It’s ignored. They get to their destination and the lead guitarist finds his $3,500 guitar destroyed. They complain again, and United ignores them. So what do they do? Sit down with their patched-together instruments and write a little ditty about the whole experience. When it went viral, THAT got United’s attention. Watch the music video of their song.

Mobile Media Usage Soars, Opens New Vistas for Marketers

More evidence that mobile’s day is (finally) here.

SMS Money Transfers with Africa’s M-PESA MobileBehavior

What I love about the mobile revolution is the myriad areas it’s impacting. From entertaining content to gaming to personal communication. This article describes how mobile phones are being used to exchange money via SMS texting in areas of rural Africa that lie well outside the traditional banking world.

First music video shot on iPhone 3GS? Reyna Perez, “Love Love Love.”

This was as inevitable as daybreak, but still worth a view. Add another item to the long list of examples of how production of content is being commoditized by technology.

The Future of the iPhone: Intelligent Object Recognition

I generally don’t like far-flung projections about the future. They’re usually way off. But with iPhone, it’s a different story. The technology at hand is Object Recognition, and its potential is laid out here in two examples. One, say you’re at the Eiffel Tower and point the phone’s camera at it, and up pops all sorts of contextual information. That’s because the Tower was identified as an object, causing related database links to bring up various info about it. The second example is face recognition. Imagine the same thing, but only pointing the phone at someone’s face, and it bringing up info about them. Most remarkable is perhaps that all this is in the latest patent filing by Apple.

Eternal moonwalk – A tribute to Michael Jackson.

Did you hear Michael Jackson died? Despite the overwhelming coverage, this is both an inspiring tribute and a great use of the technology.

Hilarious Family Guy bit about those annoying TV show promos that pop up during shows