DOUG SCHUMACHER

experience designer + writer

iphone

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 :: The first Augmented Reality app for the iPhone in US, multi-perspective storytelling on HBO, and a font that wants to lick you

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

Yelp Brings First US Augmented Reality App to iPhone Store

Crazy good, if you have an iPhone with GPS. IMO, the most impressive thing I’ve seen on the iPhone yet. If you don’t have an iPhone, the vid at the bottom takes you through the experience, which for me included the 9 times shaking the iPhone before “Monocle”, the AR app, kicked in. Well worth it, though.

Mobile Marketing: Brands Can Build a Successful App Strategy

With the Yelp AR as inspiration for mobile apps, here’s a good overview on what that can entail. While apps have been over-hyped — at least from a revenue standpoint — they can still be great solutions for brands, when done right. I think the right perspective is to view them not as a big idea by themselves, but as part of an overall, cohesive brand strategy.

BarTab – Facebook gifting hits the bars

Facebook’s first move to take their gifting and e-com platform off the web and into, in this case, a bar. There’s a bit of a ‘why hasn’t this been done before’ factor for me, which is a good sign for the developer. I like this idea. Especially when people use it to buy me a drink.

HBO Imagine – The Affair – multi-perspective storytelling

I’m not sure when this came out, but it’s an impressive take on alternate storytelling methods. Personally, I find a lot of explorations in this area to be intriguing, but not engaging. This one pulled me in.

“I Am A”, where the mundane becomes fascinating and the outrageous suddenly seems normal

A funny meme going on over at Reddit. It’s basically a post in the form of a statement about yourself, truthful or otherwise. Many of them end in AMA (Ask Me Anything), adding a new dimension to the thread. These range from “I worked at a major record label for years, AMA” to “I’m on acid, AMA”. You can imagine where it goes from there.

Ad.ly – In-Stream Advertising on Twitter

The idea is, as a Twitterer, you sign up with ad network Ad.ly and they insert one post a day into your Twitter stream. I like the concept in principle, but think the fact that it’s a paid post, and not even posted by the user, should be more readily identified. Ideally, this would go into the stream without even appearing to be from the user. Perhaps not technically possible, because like most of the technical developments involving Twitter, this one doesn’t involve Twitter. It’s all developed by a 3rd party. Strange? Welcome to business in the 21st century.

Social-Media: Is Seth Godin Protecting Your Brand?

Interesting idea involving Seth Godin and his Squidoo property. He’s pulling together a lot of public and open source data feeds to create a dashboard of a given brand’s online conversation. And for $400 a month, brands can have a hand in what consumers see by editing some of the surrounding text, highlight certain posts, redirecting visitors to their site, etc. If this was a stand-alone service, it wouldn’t be a threat to brands, because it would be mostly invisible. The individual conversations themselves would be more likely to rise to the top of Google search results than the dashboard page. But this site is contained within Seth’s Squidoo site, who’s content is doing very well in Google’s rankings. Thus brands may be forced to play. That’s why one source in the article calls this “brand hijacking”. I’d say it’s either that, or smart product development.

Google Introduces Sidewiki For Annotating Webpages

The concept is simple. In the Google toolbar is an option to leave comments in a sidebar that pops up on any given webpage. Something interesting to note is that this concept was done about 10 years ago. I think it was Gator. And it actually caused lawsuits over the idea of enabling users to make comments visible when other users come to your webpage. (The comments are visible in a sidebar in the browser, not the actual page. There’s a good video here on how this works.) This time, I wouldn’t be surprised if the idea really takes off. What’s different this time? 1. There’s definitely a heightened sense of community now more than ever. 2. There’s a lot less trust in government and corporations now than ever (the previous lawsuits centered around people leaving negative comments on corporate sites). 3. This time, it’s Google.

The Pioneer Woman, an Internet and publishing sensation

Fantastic story about a woman who “moved out of LA to marry the Marlboro Man and live on a ranch”, as she puts it. A couple of years ago, she started blogging, mostly to give her mom something to read abut their lives. Today, she has about 13 million page views a month. At the core of it all is not a fluke, but someone with a distinct voice writing about something people have a curiosity in.

Swing City – Wild customized font for editorial

Crazy example of typography in editorial. This brings up an interesting dilemma. As publishers slash costs, there will be less budget for developing visuals like this. And beyond budget, as publishing moves online, a font treatment like this will likely cease to exist, because headlines for articles just about have to be in HTML for any sort of search engine compliance. And publishers will be less inclined to spend money on something that has diminishing odds of driving interest and readership.

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 :: 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 :: 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