DOUG SCHUMACHER

experience designer + writer

apple

Creativing :: Seinfeld on smartphones, a variety of iPhone app approaches, and development issues marketers should know

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What’s going on in new media marketing, pulled from social bookmarking site Creativing.com:

What Seinfeld thinks about Blackberries and iPhones

I don’t know what he’s been doing for the past five years, but he hasn’t lost it.

Adobe’s Photoshop.com iPhone app goes live

I’m digging this. It has the standard color balance and tinting features, a couple of special effects, and a series of preset image effects. It very fluid: Love the interface of sliding your finger left to right to adjust the strength of the effect. That part of it actually feels more intuitive and accurate than the computer app.

Volkswagen latches onto iPhone game for GTI

Not all iPhone apps have to be a big production. This game behind VWs GTI app was around for a while. Apparently VW just dropped in the GTI module, and then gave it away for free as branded content. I think this is a smart way to spend an ad budget, and suspect we’ll see more of this type thing. As the iPhone app store shoots towards a projected 100,000 apps by the end of this year, there’s a lot of great content out there with very little exposure. And VW realized they didn’t have to reinvent the wheel to make an impact.

Branded Virtual Goods Clicked 10 Times More Than Non-Branded Counterparts

An interesting report amid all the clamor about how sick people are of commercialism. Sounds like it’s more the commercials they’re sick of. There have been a million definitions about what good branding means — a promise to the customer; what people say about you; the value of a company once you subtract all the assets. This finding is a testament that good brands still matter. And whatever branding represents, it’s something people respond to.

Microsoft Cuts Deal With Twitter and Facebook to Integrate Feeds With Bing

Clearly a lot written on this subject this week. Beyond the amusing love/hate quadrangle going on between Microsoft, Google, Facebook, and Twitter, the big headline for me is that this is the first time I’m aware of that Google has had a search competitor who was able to generate search results for content that they couldn’t. That combined with Bing’s already positive reviews and this should get interesting.

Martha Stewart Says It’s About Omnipresence

Love her or not so much, she’s build a powerful brand and shown resilience when the chips were down. Her statement about omnipresence is really an amalgam of concepts including touch point marketing, CRM, brand consistency, and social media’s best practices. This also underscores the need for authenticity, as the more places and forms a brand’s communications live in, the harder it becomes to forge a message that’s not true to the company’s core.

Infographic of the Day: Watch the World Wake Up, on Twitter

Called ‘Good Morning’, this animated infographic takes tweets that say “Good Morning” and charts them on a rotating globe graphic by what time of morning that was tweeted. Early, mid or late. What results is a wave of colors sweeping across a region of the world. What’s most noticeable in both of these is the lack of activity on Twitter in China. Maybe he just couldn’t parse Mandarin, but if that’s not the case, it’s a striking difference.

An Inside Look at 4 Developer Ecosystems

Facebook, iPhone, Twitter, and Google Wave. A look at the pros and cons of developing on each. As creative marketing solutions continue to be heavily defined by the platforms they live on, an understanding of the benefits and challenges of those four majors is not only important for developers, but also the creatives, strategists, producers, and account people involved in the project.

iPlotz: wireframing, mockups and prototyping for websites and applications

One of my favorite new Web hosted apps. If you do any level of wireframing or diagramming and aren’t wed to an installed app like Omnigraffle, this is worth looking into. Some very smart time saving and customizing features.

Full Circle In Sight As Inventor Of The World Wide Web Signs Up For Twitter

Tim Berners-Lee, credited with inventing the Web, has found Twitter, and apparently isn’t impressed. I love that the guy who gave us the wild and wacky chaos of HTML finds the Twitter interface confusing.

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

Creativing :: Twitter for writing movies, Facebook plays with privacy and fire, and what the new album art looks like

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

Horror Movie Inspired by Twitter?

From the sounds of it, this was a movie written across Twitter. I can’t imagine it was line by line, but probably more general plot developments and so on. All created under the Creative Commons license. The movie site downplays the whole Twitter thing, which is interesting because is would seem to be a marketing angle. They’re probably waiting until release, and then build it up.

Did Shaq Just Find Out He Was Traded On Twitter?

Meanwhile, Shaq seemed to be having his own horror movie play out on Twitter. I find this harder to believe than screenwriting via Twitter. And I realize it’s an employer’s market, but this is a tough way to treat your organization’s top employees. Stunt? Perhaps. But it doesn’t seem in Shaq’s nature to place himself at the butt end of a prank.

The Day Facebook Changed – Messages to Become Public by Default

That article’s headline may sound histrionic, but I’m not sure it’s the case. I’ve had what’s essentially the same conversation with a number of digital marketing people recently regarding online privacy issues. Most agreed that people generally have no idea how much information can be compiled on them. Justice Antonin Scalia certainly didn’t. All publicly available online. Clearly, Facebook is shooting for a tight revenue model, and the potential payout for delivering the level of targeting promised in the data they hold is enormous. But in that pursuit, they’ve gone to a place that’s counter to their past position of users first, marketers second. And when their user’s don’t like something, they let Facebook know.

Facebook Launches New Granular Publisher Controls, Transforms Personal Publishing

To counter the above move to expose more of people’s online actions, Facebook is responding with more personal control over exactly what content is public, and what isn’t. The latest tactic is giving people on-the-spot options for every post, in addition to the global privacy settings. I wouldn’t be surprised to see a scenario in which a privacy scare happens on a wide scale, and mass numbers of users respond by adjusting their privacy settings to block most of what they’re doing.

Google to Target Users by FICO Score

Like Facebook, Google’s gotta make a buck. And if they have a weakspot relative to Facebook’s targeting, it’s that there’s simply not much data available on the gazillions of people using Google every day. The FICO profiling is a move to address that.

YouTube CTA Overlay Lets You Drive Users Elsewhere

If there’s any remaining doubt that Google is pushing YouTube hard to find a strong revenue model, here’s the proof. The rule that you don’t fix what isn’t broke? YouTube traffic hasn’t decreased a bit, so this is all revenue-driven. I’ve noticed the YouTube experience getting more and more cluttered. A lot of video screens are cluttered with overlays, comments, and ads you have to click to remove and even then aren’t gone until you’re well into the clip.

And while this is initially only available for brands and charities, it seems odd not to just level the entire field. So when everyone’s trying to make a few pennies on their lastest post, YouTube could end up feeling a lot different than the site that set out to make video viewing as simple and easy as possible.

And the Winner of the $1 Million Netflix Prize (Probably) Is …

I covered crowdsourcing quite a bit last week. This project’s been out there a while, but looks like the contest has come to a close. This was not a small project, either. The challenge was to find a way to improve Netflix’s recommendation engine by 10%. The winners are a consortium of statisticians, machine learning experts and computer engineers from America, Austria, Canada and Israel. They talked about it as if was a fun challenge. The way you and I might describe a hobby. What I’m curious about is, Would they have taken the job for $1,000,000 in the first place, or would that not have covered the cost of their collective expertise and time?

Most Free iPhone Apps Don’t Bring Bacon Home

I think iPhone apps are great. I have a phone full of them to prove it. But as a marketing tool, I think they have tightly-capped potential. They’ll be wildly successful for a select few brands, but most brands will find it very difficult to embed themselves in people’s lives that deeply. User’s simply can’t accomodate apps on anything close to the level of paid media impressions they can absorb. Here’s a related chart on TechCrunch.

Anecdotally, I have probably 15-20 apps that I use on any kind of a regular basis. More than once a month. Compared to the estimated 3,500 marketing messages I’m exposed to every day, it’s a drop in the bucket. I realize the value is signficantly greater for the apps, but it still makes them a low-odds play. I’d love a good contrarian argument on this.

T-shirt comes with free music downloads

Could this be the new album cover? Since the onset of CDs, then downloads, there’s been a fair complaint that for a lot of music, the album art provided an important visual emellishment to the music. Now there’s The Music Tee. A shirt that gives the buyer the right to free music downloads. The total cost of $40 is actually more than a CD or the download price, but you could argue that a T-shirt has a lot more value than a CD jewel box. And for the band, would I rather my fans have a CD jewel case sitting on a shelf somewhere along with 500 others, or wearing a shirt of my band out in public? No-brainer.

Less, But Better – an interview with design legend Dieter Rams

A brief retrospective of Rams and how influential his work has been, and on no less of a design heavyweight than Apple’s Jonathan Ive. The comparison between Rams’ work, much of it from around 40 years ago, and Ive’s, is striking.