DOUG SCHUMACHER

experience designer + writer

socialmedia

Creativing :: Facebook is heroin, Farmville engagement is sliding, and the Twitter Times personalized newspaper

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

Tweet of the Week

“There was $250,000 lining the walls of that stand, how much clearer can I say it: “THERE IS ALWAYS MONEY IN THE BANANA STAND!” #ADquotes

Facebook is Social Media Heroin and that Puts It at Risk–Or Does It? | Forrester Blogs

Admittedly, the headline got me. But it’s an interesting case for why just because a social media experience is addictive doesn’t mean it isn’t in jeopardy of competition. Remember MySpace? Me either. But they were flying high when Facebook was just starting. And Facebook took over because of a better user experience. And that’s what people are complaining about Facebook now.

Bar codes get around town and get more useful – Yahoo! Finance

I’ve long felt that QR codes will have their day. As someone who’s found all sorts of convenient life hacks around mobile phones (taking a picture of my parking deck location is a fave), QR codes provide a convenient shortcut to entering text on a mobile phone. I really like how Google is distributing codes to their businesses. Think about walking along and seeing a store that you don’t have time to visit. Or it’s closed. You take a snapshot of the QR code on the window, and have their info logged for easy access later. That’s a very functional use, and I’m sure there are a lot of creative opportunities out there, as well.

The Twitter Tim.es – a personalized newspaper generated from your Twitter account

This is a great idea for people who find value in Twitter without having to constantly update the world on their last meal. It creates a magazine-style interface of all the links the people you follow are sending out. You can also filter it by lists or media sources. A much improved interface for consuming Twitter information than Twitter of any of the content generation-focused 3rd party apps.

Flipboard for iPad

Check out the demo video for a quick intro to the concept. This looks like it’s very well done, and like the Yahoo iPad app demonstration, makes a convincing case for why slates will dominate media consumption. Also, keep in mind we’re still in the very nascent stages of this type of content interface. The Flipboard branding is also nicely done.

Dribbble – What are you working on?

A fun site. Upload a snippet of a design. Limited to 400×300 pixels. So you’re not going to see the full page here. And that’s what I like about it. Interactive design is made up of so many micro-components, and sometimes simply a great button design or rollover effect can gain as much notice as a complete page. This site forces you to focus on the smaller aspects of design, and I found that a refreshing perspective.

Putting Facebook’s 500 million in perspective.: The Social Path

You may have heard about Facebook crossing the 500 million user mark. This is an amusing look at some other things that have hit 500 million, for better or worse.

Zynga’s Farmville Lost 4.4 Million Players Last Month

Ran across this older article on Farmville’s drop in traffic earlier this year. And it’s been a continuing slide. I think a lot of game-oriented systems are going to find people’s ever-changing interests a big help at launch, but a challenge for keeping long term activity. The article does a good job breaking down the information.

YouTube – Pug sings Batman theme

Randomness of the week. Thx to @gregtypes.

Twitter’s Noon Nadir – NYTimes.com

Can’t say I’m shocked that the ‘happiest’ day on twitter is a weekend, and the ‘saddest’ is a workday. The inforgraphics are interesting. The west coast lags the east coast a bit even when adjusted for time zones. Possibly because west coasters waking up later?

ToneCheck Checks Your Tone Like A Spell Checker Checks Your Spelling

I’ll be curious to see how well this works. Gauging sentiment is very difficult, and that’s really what this is doing. If they have a great algorithm, it could be the key to much more accurate assessment of online conversations.

Creativing :: What Steve Jobs should say, kings of YouTube, and dissecting the Old Spice campaign

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

Tweet of the Week

If Jobs doesn’t start this press conference with “Look at your CEO now back to me now back at your CEO now BACK TO ME” he’s missed a trick.

How the Old Spice Videos Are Being Made

A good overview on how the campaign was created. It’s interesting to see user generated components kicking in, which is mentioned towards the end of the article.

Skin Lightening Facebook App Sparks Controversy

Have to say I think this issue is blown out of proportion. Maybe it’s because in Venice Beach all I see are people trying to darken their skin.

Seth’s Blog: A hierarchy of failure worth following

An excellent distillation of where to take risks, and where not to.

Chatroulette Rolls Out Local And Custom Channels. Top Channel: “Sex”

Shocking!

5 Non-Profit iPhone Apps You Should Know About

A few mobile apps from the non-profit sector. My pref on these is the simplest one, the Salvation Army “Bellringer”. A nice way to reenforce a strong brand icon.

Queen Rania of Jordan takes to TwitVid to Promote Her Country [VIDEO]

While the contest info delivery vehicle, the video, might be what you expect from a Royal, the underlying promotion has a nice feel of global inclusiveness. Swap two people from your country with two people from somewhere else in the world.

YouTube – Most viewed videos

With the recent Justin Bieber / Lady Gaga ‘most viewed’ showdown, I was curious to see the 100 most viewed vids on YouTube. Perhaps not surprisingly, the majority seem to be music videos, interspersed with baby’s laughing, people dancing, and allusions to sex. The view counts are also interesting to note. The top vid has 245m views. The 100th: 40m views. That’s a pretty precipitous drop, and if you consider that 2 billion videos are viewed every day on YouTube, it’s really a long tail play with a huge majority at very low view counts.

Is Social Media Failing to Produce Business Leads?

This pulled select from the article says it all in regards to shifting marketing forces: Former President of CBS News Andrew Heyward wrote in the Harvard Business Review last year that “every company is a media company,” summarizing the idea that marketing is shifting to an environment where advertisers need to produce compelling content in order to succeed.

Creativing :: Social Media’s World Cup, Ridley Scott directs YouTube, and social media meets the offline world.

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

Tweet of the Week

Come on, city of Cleveland, you’ve been on top for years. Give another city a chance.

The World Cup of Social Media – Advertising Age

While there’s been a lot of talk the last couple of years about the need for global marketing, perhaps nothing drilled that message home like the World Cup. A good read as much for the prose as the content.

Ridley Scott and YouTube Want You To Film One Day in Your Life

I’m quite curious about this because it seems to intersect a lot of different things that already exist. I mean, isn’t YouTube really an ongoing day in the life? So then this is just an edited version of that, with even less contest to what each of the video clips is about? I’ll be very curious to see how they bring a bigger POV to this and make it more than just a mashup of video clips. Perhaps this is the Internet version of Powaqqatsi.

What Is The Value Of A Facebook Fan? Zero! | Forrester Blogs

This line pretty much sums it up: It is what companies do with fans that creates value, not merely that a brand has fans.

Seth’s Blog: Payola

A lot of SEO people spend their lives trying to outsmart a campus of Google geniuses with PhDs. Kinda like going 1-on-1 with LeBron James. You might get a lucky basket now and then, but he’s just going to come back even stronger. If you want good SEO, don’t think like a Google engineer, think like a consumer. Bottom line is there are always games going on to goose online performance. But long-term value tends to align with consumer interests.

NYTimes Shows How Civic APIs Should Be Built

I like how often we see data going from rote facts to entertainment value. The idea of taking voting district information and attaching that to landmarks in NYC is exactly the type of way brands can take data and create interesting stories about what they or their customers are doing.

Google’s Display Advertising Plans Include Gmail, YouTube – Advertising Age

This isn’t the first time I’ve heard someone suggest the online display game is on. And if Google’s piling money into it, that’s a pretty strong indicator.

The Real Life Social Network: How Facebook Affects Offline Relationships | MobileBehavior

This highlights a major challenge of social media at the moment. Sharing the same posts with vastly different networks of people in our lives. This includes a nugget of insight about where Google’s going to be aiming to penetrate Facebook’s armor.

Why Google’s Launching ‘Me’ and Facebook’s Real Future – Advertising Age

If you’re not familiar with Facebook’s Open Graph or why Google is gunning for Facebook, this is a good quick read.

Creativing :: Massive Glastonbury photo tag, Google’s uphill run at Facebook, and mobile heads in-store

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

Tweet of the Week

Man. I could listen to Jony Ive talk about “materials” all day long. I mean—unless I had the option of doing literally anything else.

GlastoTag – One huge photo. A whole load of tags. | Glastonbury Music Festival

A very simple but powerful idea. Take a hi-res photo of everyone at a concert, and then enable them to zoom in anywhere, find, and tag themselves via Facebook. I’d also have added an easy way for them to drop and save their photo as their profile pic.

Disney Puts Movie Tickets on a Facebook Site – NYTimes.com

One of those ideas where you look at it and say “Really, nobody’s done that yet?”

Best New Mashups: World Cup, Interview Questions, and Innovative Online Dating

More mashups. An interesting World Cup mashup that attempts to predict the score via Twitter tweets, a site to help people keep up with the latest job interview trends (you know, those trick questions!), and a match making site based on music taste from Last.fm. Interesting functionality/productivity in those last two.

Google Trying to Build Facebook Competitor? Good Luck With That

A good reminder of the importance of cohesion across all your brand touchpoints. Google has an impressive lineup of touchpoints, competitive enough feature-wise, but often lacking the key ingredient. A critical mass audience.

If Banner Ads Are Dead, What’s Next? – MarketingVOX

While the headline is a little alarmist, the point is, a lot of people are finding banners aren’t driving the response rates they used to. Of course, that happens with any medium. For many advertisers, it’s most likely a matter of them not doing anything of remote interest in the banner in the first place. And then they wonder why nobody notices their ad.

Rory Sutherland: Sweat the small stuff | Video on TED.com

Fantastic TED presentation by a British ad exec on how big ideas don’t require big budgets.

Gay Social Network Fabulis Gets Backing from GeoCities Founder

An example of how Facebook may lose social website cache, but still retain a valuable business model. Social sites could easily go niche, especially ones build around currently strong communities. But like Fabulis, they’ll likely use Facebook integration to accelerate growth at their inception. And that keeps Facebook in a powerful position to deliver relevant advertising.

Vuvuzelas for BP by Adam Quirk — Kickstarter

I’ve mentioned kickstarter before. And out of that biz model comes an edgy cause marketing campaign that’s not only blowing away the creator’s estimated budget, but has to be generating enormous amounts of buzz. I really think there’s a lot of potential for a sort of event artists that can pull these things together in a way that people will want to support.

Big Potential for In-Store Mobile Marketing – eMarketer

Mobile isn’t just for when your customer is trying to find you. It can be for when they’re standing in your store. However, while people are growing more accustomed to grabbing their mobile for product research while in store, only about 20% of Multichannel retailers are using any form of m-commerce. Looks like a lot of potential growth.

YouTube – Nissan Leaf iAd announcement

What can you take from this? That there’s likely going to be a lot of business in the area of building the experiences backing these ads. Of course, the comments would indicate that people won’t tolerate iAds. Yet again and again, people choose ad-supported over pay models. (Hulu will be an interesting case study, although news site after new site has failed trying to go paid.)

Creativing :: Free ebooks correlate to printed sales, Social media crisis lessons, and the first ChatRoulette campaign

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

Tweet of the Week

There are pretty much just two writer moods: “I am a GOD!” and “I suck!” Today, Minions, I am a GOD!

Free ebooks correlated with increased print-book sales – Boing Boing

A similar correlation has been shown in the music industry between file-sharing and volume of music purchased. I’m sure there’s a similar correlation between YouTube and TV watching (a la “Lazy Sunday”). The takeaway? If you have something to say, lay it out there. If it’s valuable, people will want more.

3 Crisis Survival Lessons for the Social Media Age

Case Studies are often the best way to learn. While these aren’t full of deep stats, reading about these 3 situations will decrease your odds of repeating them.

We’re Not In Kansas Anymore. Well, We Are — Google, Kansas.

While their tactic may not be all that tight, I think strategically Topeka is dead on to be in hot pursuit of Google’s broadband ISP service. It will have a positive impact on education, attracting businesses, and overall economic efficiencies. But next time, hopefully they’ll call in a good creative shop to help with the execution.

Google Kansas II: Duluth Strikes Back [VIDEO]

A shot back across the bow of Topeka. It’s nice to see people across the US so excited about broadband. This also demonstrates how people everywhere are taking marketing into their own hands. Google-style, you could say.

Is Content King? Then Distribution Is Crown Prince – Advertising Age

A lot of good points about content and the distribution of that content. It seems to me that right now, there’s more emphasis on distribution. Everyone and their mother setting up social media distribution points and trying to game the search game. While not really offering distinct content of any sort that’s being pushed through those channels

Those Hooves? That’s the Sound of the Internet Search Apocalypse – Advertising Age

SEO is quickly becoming a system too easily gamed. I have to think this will end someday soon. The question is, will Google end it on their own, or will one of their competitors end it by offering a better product, or will government step in? Stay tuned.

How Lionsgate Plans to Take on ‘Twitter Effect’ for ‘Kick-Ass’ – Advertising Age

The technology behind this is about integrating the conversation streams across Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace. This makes a lot of sense from a brand management and social conversation standpoint. In the comments, you’ll find some good counterpoints about loss of cohesion in the conversation, but I’m not sure it’s any worse than most YouTube threads for movie trailers. If anything, my issue is that the brand’s presence in these threads seems to heavy-handed.

Adverblog: French Connection brings Chatroulette into its Manifesto

If there’s any question about the need for speed in today’s marketing climate, consider this UGC campaign based around ChatRoulette for French Connection. A simple, quickly-deployed UGC campaign that leverages a rocketing trend.

Amazing iPhone » Time warp your iPhone 3GS video with Slowmo app

This actually looks pretty cool.

Creativing :: Tweet of the Week, Pissed off at Google, and Foursquare goes for the gold

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

Tweet of the Week

if ($caffeinated) { echo ‘good morning!’; }

P&G Launches eStore to Test Marketing Concepts – MarketingVOX

I’m curious to see what this ‘lab’ looks like from a features and development angle. It’s clearly designed for nimbleness, which will only be a growing trend as everything seems to be moving toward immediacy. From product development to brand experience to social marketing.

Fuck you, Google « Fugitivus

I’ve felt for a while that the tech industry is veering perilously close to blowing the top off the whole privacy issue. From location-based services to misunderstood social network sharing to cookie tracking, there are a lot of hot buttons, and people are starting to push them.

Twitter Is Still Growing Rapidly [STATS]

A week or two ago it was widely reported that Twitter was dropping off in popularity. However, they were gauging unique visitors to the site, and with so many people using 3rd party apps, like TweetDeck, that could have a large impact. The other key stat is obviously overall Tweets sent, and that’s where apparently Twitter is looking just fine.

Foursquare Inks Deals With Major Media and Entertainment Brands

Mobile is certainly heating up, and Foursquare is on the front burner. While Foursquare currently operates under the guise of fun and games, location-based services on mobile will likely soon be the way most people figure out what they’re going to do for entertainment on a given evening.

Wi-Fi Turns Arizona Bus Ride Into a Rolling Study Hall – NYTimes.com

Another good story on technology improving lives in a very simple way.

Google Liquid Galaxy live demo at TED [VIDEO]

Google connects 8 large LCD screens in a wraparound view to it’s Earth and Street View apps for an amazing voyage around what feels like a pretty small world. The trip from LA to SF beats any bullet train proposal I’ve seen.

Skittles | Experience the Rainbow

Very fun experience. The surreal carnival feel fits great with a product as quirky as Skittles. The long extended page reminds me of suck.com back in the day. It’s an unconventional format which defies most usability issues, but who’s really coming to Skittles.com for functionality anyway?

E-commerce and Facebook: Friends or foes? – BusinessWeek

Some of the good and bad of doing ecommerce on Facebook

Motorola Maintains Mobile Subscriber Market Share Lead – MarketingVOX

Amid the iPhone craze, it’s important to keep in mind that overall, there’s still a small percentage of users who have one. Thus if you want to go mass on mobile, you’ll have to go more lowest common denominator.

Creativing :: Tweet of the Week, Museum’s engage in trash talk, and the 10 greatest YouTube mashups

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

Tweet of the Week

Today’s my last day at Sun. I’ll miss it. Seems only fitting to end on a #haiku. Financial crisis/Stalled too many customers/CEO no more

Ahead Of Super Bowl, Museum Heads Trash-Talk : NPR

If you want to breath some fresh air into the brand personality of your museum, you probably couldn’t do much better than this. There’s both a transcript and the audio version. How often do you get to hear museum directors talking smack to each other (in jest, of course).

Augmented reality mirror picks makeup for the ladies (video) — Engadget

The first line says it all on this. “Ladies and rockers alike”. You could also add kids, Halloween celebrants, Mardi Gras, etc etc. While practical, this could have a lot of pure entertainment potential.

Facebook Could Eat the Web – The Steve Rubel Lifestream

With everyone talking about Google and Apple, Facebook continues to advance in ways that make a much deeper connection between our personal and commercial relationships. For a lot of people, Facebook is quickly becoming the most convenient place to do almost anything online. And that’s always been the best way to increase sales. The thing they’ll need to be concerned about? Losing consumer’s trust, in the form of scams. As we’ve already seen, it’s much easier to social-hack someone when you have them on a trusted platform where they’re sharing a lot of personal information.

AppSlappy 32: “The iPad Episode” « AppSlappy

These guys do a good job countering most of the iPad objections I’ve come across. I do think there’s still a big issue in it not having Flash, as so much rich online content is Flash based, and this device is about absorbing media more than anything.

Facebook Trends: Goodbye Doppelganger, Hello Urban Dictionary Week

Maybe we need a new category here, Facebook Trend of the Week.

So Long, And Thanks For All The Flash — FarukAt.eş

A compelling argument for the end of Flash, more from a business sense than whether or not Flash is a better experience. I have to agree where he talks about development times and universal access … two major factors for any marketing project. And IMO, it’s the marketers that made Flash, with their expansive microsites and ubiquitous Flash ads. But the key factor for Flash has always been ubiquity and impact. If those are gone, the marketers will be too.

Leaked “Lost” episode spurs surprising fan reaction – Yahoo! News

When the season premier was leaked to YouTube, the reaction was often ‘don’t ruin it for me’. While this will give the networks a sigh of relief, it’s also important to realize that Lost is one of only a couple of shows that could garner this type of reaction.

Top 10 YouTube Mashups of All Time

Because of its simple user experience, popularity, and open API structure, YouTube has always been a good way to showcase mashup capabilities. What’s interesting here is the scope of the mashups. From simplifying an already simple UX, to tracking videos like you might a stock on the NYSE.

Twitter / eMarketer: Stat of the day: 68% of on …

It’s been reported that email marketing is falling by the wayside for many heavy social media users. This stat certainly supports that idea.