DOUG SCHUMACHER

experience designer + writer

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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 :: Twitter Celebrity Death Match, Info Gets Entertaining, And The Future Of Everything

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

Demi versus Perez? See Twitter

So celebrity angst is blowing up on Twitter. Let’s see, you take a group of people flush with cash and  big egos from getting lots of adulation, a good percentage of them are relatively unstable, and, they’ve had handlers taking care of most of their public presence and interface with the media. Now let’s suddenly give them a line of communication direct to each other yet in front of millions of gawking fans and make it a format that practically encourages short, shout-like bursts. Hmmm.

Flickr Co-Founder Caterina Fake on the Value of Viral Loops

Some interesting points in this peek behind the curtain of the inception and launch of a quintessential Web 2.0 site. For one, like a lot of great internet companies, it started out as something very different from how it went big. The idea sprang, not from photography, but from conversations. Adding photos to conversations, versus making photos sharable and viral. By contrast, the other major photo sites at the time, Ophoto, Shutterfly and Snapfish, all came with baggage about how photo sites should behave. As online experiences continue to become a key part of many company’s complete brand package, remember that it’s not only about conceiving and developing these experiences, but also improving them over time. In some cases, radical changes are needed to make things happen.

Visualization Lab at The New York Times

It’s nice to see a paper like the Times — going through one of the biggest economic struggles in it’s history — continue to push ahead on the innovation front. The Visualization Lab lets you take content from data sets, articles, and speeches (like Obama and Lincoln Inaugural addresses), and crunch them into various visualizations.  The options include visualizing text, comparing values, relationships among data points, maps, and assorted charts. Perhaps the best example is a chart mapping religious affiliation to political party membership. In a time where much news is formulaic and regurgitated, this is a great way of adding impact and meaning to their content.

50 Years of Space Exploration in a cool info graph

More ways to work with information. This pops graphically, and also shows how extensive our space exploration has been. While 2001: A Space Odyssey made space feel remote and empty, this makes our trips to space feel like a habit trail of errands and shopping trips around town.

Pew Internet Reports Future of the Internet III – Selected quotes

If you’re even remotely interested in the future, this is a good read. A selection of quotes from various industry leaders on where things are going. Topics covered include the future of connectivity, social tolerance, intellectual property law and copyright, privacy and transparency, and virtual and augmented reality. What I like best is that these projections are for the year 2020, not 2050. Blink and you’ll miss it.

4 Ways Social Media is Changing Business

While the future can seem so, oh, futuristic, these are changes going on right now. There are a lot of attempts at summarizing what’s currently going on in the business world — and this certainly isn’t exhaustive — but these four boil it down concisely: 1. From “Trying to Sell” to “Making Connections”; 2. From “Large Campaigns” to “Small Acts”; 3. From “Controlling Our Image” to “Being Ourselves”; and 4. From “Hard To Reach” to “Available Anywhere”. All of which are reflected in From “Broadcasting Messages” to “Engaging In Conversations”.

Average Internet User Now Spends 68 Hours Per Month Online

While the average is still well below television, it’s gaining steadily. And in a few years, the line between the two could be impossible to draw, making the whole comparison a moot point. (I’d say watching Hulu on a big screen far more emotionally tied to TV than the Internet.) Perhaps most striking is that in those 68 hours, users visit an average of 2,700 sites. Yes, that means they spend an average of 57 seconds on each site. Marketers, there lies the challenge.

New App Tries to Fill the Need for a Dislike Button on Facebook

How many times have I wanted to ‘dislike’ something? It even feels weird ‘liking’ a good story about a tragic incident. I’m not sure we need to break down our stream of emotions into a digitized ranking system (like pretty much the rest of the Web?), but here’s one company’s take on it. One problem I see here is the overbearing presence of the threadsy brand name in the post. Takes the punch out of ‘abhorring’ something.

Simple, Fluid Navigation System

This takes about a minute to check out, and is worth every second. While some of it is in Portuguese and the content seems random, it’s not difficult to imagine how this could be applied to a number of situations. I do think the UI’s hot zones and responsiveness needs a little tweaking, but the central idea is there.

Alice in Wonderland Pictures

Tim Burton’s latest work looks amazing.

Creativing :: A breakup test from Bjorn Borg, the problem with Web reputation systems, and iPhone app development gets easier

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

Break Up Test

One of the funniest things I’ve seen all year. And from Bjorn Borg (he of the frozen tundra demeanor). In truth, this doesn’t really come from Bjorn. Actually, it’s from his underwear.

Building Web Reputation Systems: The Blog: The Dollhouse Mafia, or “Don’t Display Negative Karma”

If you spend any time on sites where the reputation system is a key part of decision-making (ebay, elance), this is a good read. It’s also an interesting look inside community behavior. The theory is, Reputation or Rating systems are flawed, because of what the writer calls “karma bankruptcy”. Once someone’s reputation drops to a low level, they either head to a different community, or start a new account. Sometimes you can’t beat picking up the phone and calling an old friend for a reference. There’s also an interesting example of how people were being shaken down for loot in the game Sims, by a group appropriately calling themselves the Sims Mafia.

PhotoSketch: Photoshop Image Recognition = Awesome

Remarkable. You sketch a scene, label what the primary images are, and it scans the web for like images that also work well together, and automatically composites them into a single image. The results are pretty crazy.

MediaVest Diverts Broadcast Budget to Hulu

I’ve long been surprised that more advertisers aren’t jumping onto Hulu, as reports were going around that their inventory wasn’t even close to sold out. Being a big fan of Hulu, I can vouch for the memorability of the placements. Of course these days, content publishers never meet an ad they don’t like. So we’ll see if we end up with the same overly-saturated ad marketplace that network TV has become.

Will the FTC’s Blogging Rules Slow Endorsements?

This is probably no big surprise, but starting Dec 1, marketers will be responsible for accurate compensation disclosure in product reviews on blogs. It seems they’re primarily holding the marketer responsible, which may sound diverted, but I think makes sense, since it involves the decision to provide compensation. That should also help keep this can of worms from opening too wide, although I can’t imagine there won’t be a slew of lawsuits ensuing from this.

Knowledge Genie – Making Publishing Web Content For Profit Easier

Ecommerce model that makes it easy to sell your digital-based work online. You can enable content purchases or subscriptions across a range of media types. It’s a pretty slick model, once you have the content to sell. Setup is fast, although the store itself is a little bland looking. They need to build this out into a much more customizable widget that could be embedded anywhere. But the core idea is great, and the UX is simple.

twtapps :: simple and useful business twitter applications

If you’re marketing on Twitter to any degree, you’ll likely want to know how to do things via Twitter, such as conduct polls, exchange business cards, give out coupons, create contests, or send gifts.

Agencies Need to Think Like Software Companies

As branding and marketing venture into product development, about the only common denominator among companies in terms of product development is online technology. Thus agencies that want to play in that sandbox are going to have to solve problems from a technological point of view as a key part of their service offering.

Adobe Labs – Adobe Flash Professional CS5: Applications for iPhone

Soon you’ll be able to crunch out iPhone apps from Flash. Feeling like there just aren’t enough iPhone apps out there for you? Get ready for a new wave of them.

Flexible Love

Amazing bit of product design ingenuity in Japan. Makes sense that this furniture idea would come from a places with serious space challenges.

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 :: Another reason not to count clicks, video monitor in a print mag, and Jack Daniel’s raises a glass

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

Study: Half Of Ad Impressions, 95 Percent Of Clicks Fraudulent

This sounds pretty alarming at first, but for those using legitimate campaign evaluation methods, they’ll be able to identify the fraudsters quickly and cost effectively. It’s all about using the right Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). If you haven’t heard by now, forget clicks. Click’s aren’t even last week. They’re last century. Focus on metrics that can’t be gamed near as easily by a bot. The major KPIs include: Visit rates – how has the campaign effected your overall site traffic? Engagement rates – are people actually finding your site relevant to your marketing messages? Conversion rates – are visitors actually doing something to impact your bottom line? The deeper you look, the harder it is for scammers to skew your results.

Timing Is Crucial To Maximize Exposure With Social Media

Timing in social media is key from a cultural point of view, but also tactically in terms of what time of the day or day of the week you launch the campaign. And while much of this focuses on what I consider digital PR rather than social media, the principles apply on a broad scale.

Google’s Ad Exchange Honcho Joins “Real-Time Advertising” Startup

When I saw this headline, I immediately thought of what Doug Weaver from Upstream has been writing about for the past several years. That the process of buying and selling media is due for a major streamlining. The Cliff Notes version of this is to think of Google Adwords for display advertising, industry-wide. And potentially video units, as well. As a creative, I generally favor anything that streamlines the non-creative department part of the business, because it tends to shift emphasis to the process of creating the ads. Of course, the challenge for creatives will be the overall commodotization of the advertising business. To date, when one part of the business reduces friction, it affects the whole industry. As an example, when media buying became detached from creative and handled by separate agencies, there were cost savings for clients. But there was also a struggle to get the two groups working together conceptually. And the creative process became more akin to filling out a job order.

Evolving Beyond The Banner Ad – Digg’s new ad unit

Speaking of ad units, this is interesting, if not clearly overdue. In social media, why not let the community evaluate the advertising the same way they evaluate the content? That’s what Digg is doing. And this could be great for your Nike’s, beers, and on Digg, Ron Paul. The big question is, What about the brands that don’t have lifestyle cache or emotional relevance to the audience evaluating them? And if that can’t be created in all brands, which I think is a challenge, then how will Digg be able to sell ads to those companies?

Really great Demo of new experiment from Mozilla

A good, early stage peak into the future of the semantic web. And, unlike so many concepts in beta, this one’s ready to go.

Technology to run video ads in print magazines

This is certainly attention-getting, and at this point anything that gives that advantage to magazine advertising will probably help them sell ads. But print publications are going to need to become a lot more than low-grade video display units. Instead of feeling like a print breakthrough, this feels more like an obvious indicator that all content will soon be digital. What this misses is the idea that the online video content experience is so much richer than just a page with video. There’s sharing, favoriting, commenting, etc. If anything, viewing these small screens only makes me realize how much better the experience would be online. So hopefully they can use this to sell some ads, but I don’t think it’s even close to a long term solution for print publishing.

Twelp Is On The Way!

A good breakout of Best Buy’s Twelpforce, and how the real power of this is not just being on the latest new media bandwagon, but about taking thousands of employees and making them feel like a bigger part of the brand story.

Jack Daniel’s ‘Toast’ Application Going Strong

This is a great campaign idea – send a toast to your friends. And it’s pulling strong results early on. But having tried it, I’m surprised that it isn’t easier to select a single friend to toast, versus the system’s recommendation engine. Secondly, I can’t figure out why they wouldn’t prominently promote this on either the default page of their Facebook Fan page, or their website.

Ford’s Fiesta to Party on — Without the Fiesta

I really liked this campaign when it came out. Take 100 top YouTube video stars, and give them the new Fiesta and a gas card, with an agreed number of blog posts they’ll write about their experience with the car. And some of the bloggers actually exceeded the minimum posting requirements, partly because they found their posts about the vehicle were getting more views than their regularly-scheduled content. That speaks volumes about the effectiveness of social media and sponsored blogging. But they ran the campaign a full year prior to the vehicle’s availability in the US. And now there’s a time gap in which they have to maintain momentum. My only guess to this is that they were afraid the social media campaign might not work, or even have a backlash, and by running it so far in advance, everyone would forget about it by the time the car launched. Any better theories?

Burglar leaves his Facebook page on victims computer – gets busted

One of those stories almost too good to be true. I’ve read of burglars doing all sorts of things during their robberies. Napping. Fixing themselves a snack. Watching TV. But this trumps them all.

Creativing :: Video content with amazing range, and a UGC site making fun of Wal-Mart

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

The Myth of “Great Content” Marketing Itself

One of the common misconceptions of good content is that it drives itself via social media. Successful social media marketing needs two things. Good content, and a significant sized audience to launch that content with. If either of those are missing, you’ve got to do some work, spend some money, or both.

Twitter is Now Bigger than MySpace in the UK

This is pretty amazing. Of course, MySpace isn’t exactly on the rise, but none-the-less, a good example of how fast things change in technology. 140 characters taking over MySpace. Murdoch has to be stewing.

22 Facebook Funded Startups to Watch

A good glimpse of where Facebook is headed. Or at least where the money thinks it’s headed.

Twitter Search Queries

An example of some of the more interesting search queries in Twitter’s advanced search. As Gary V said, the most interesting thing about Twitter is the Search. I tend to agree with him. To see this live and test your own, just enter anything into Twitter’s advanced search.

Coca-Cola Zero Face Profiler game

Love this idea. Using photo-matching technology, they’ll use Facebook Connect to find other people on Facebook who look like you. But they’re only doing this with people who’ve opted in. So they first need to compile the database of images, which seems to be taking a while. I’m not sure how long ago this went live, but the database is still only 15% full, and hasn’t changed much in the last few days.

Video from Red Bull Soapbox Derby Atlanta 2009

This is just great content for a lifestyle brand. Humorous event, good music bed, and fun slide show commentary about what’s taking place in the video. What’s also great for the brand is that it was done by a 3rd party. More authenticity combined with zip for cost.

IKEA Heights [VIDEO]

A 5 minute short film shot in the IKEA in Burbank, during work hours, and presumably without authorization from IKEA. It’s hysterical watching them act out the various scenes, in the appropriate settings around the store, while random shoppers are walking by in the background. I’m sure somewhere an IKEA lawyer is cringing, but this is fun and creates a positive association with the brand in a highly-memorable way.

People of Walmart: Viral Blog Showcases Retailer’s Clientele

And now, the underside of UGC for a brand. Like the previous two cases, something completely uninitiated by the brand. In this case though, it pokes fun at the brand’s clientele. Which is arguably worse than making fun of their products. Like other popsites such as fmylife.com and latfh.com, I’d guess this will have a short life, and won’t warrant a response from the brand.

Stunning time lapse footage of the LA fires

Amazing footage of a tragic event.

Brazilian Graphic Artist and Illustrator

Another example of a cool mix of photography and illustration.

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.