DOUG SCHUMACHER

experience designer + writer

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

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

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

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

The New Online – Keep It Clear

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

PR Blackout Challenges Mom Bloggers to Return to Basics

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

The Difference Between Total Users and Active Users

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

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

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

The Big Idea: Chronicle of a Death Foretold

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

Web site recreates Apollo 11 mission in real time

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

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

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

Postcrossing – Postcards Traveling The World

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

Creativing :: 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.

Creativing :: The death and rebirth of advertising, how real can reality content get, and the Twitterverse once again attempts a shark jump.

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

TV Ratings: Neda Video Truly Shocking, Unlike Jon & Kate

John Rash has a powerful and poigniant piece on recent events in television and video. There’s a profound difference between Reality and Real content. When Reality first hatched, it seemed very ‘real’. By today’s standards, the format is more often than not highly contrived. Of course, the original appeal was the sense that it was real, and people are still looking for content that has a more real feel. The big question is, Where does that end? Or does it end? When you consider the content danger zones of violence and sex, and think about the trend perpetually arcing towards the most extreme examples you can conjure up in your mind, it’s a pretty chilling media horizon up ahead.

Advertising Industry Prospects: A Tough Year Ahead

From Advertising Age: Brace for the worst year in recorded history. About 65% worst than 1991, the previously worst year. We’re headed for a 5% drop this year, which almost feels like a recovery after a 14% drop in Q1. Increasing the challenge is a projected slow recovery. The cause of this is fundamental change in the media-related world. Newspapers are going out of business, and won’t becoming back. Car advertising is way down, and with vast numbers of dealerships going out of business, those media dollars won’t be coming back either.

Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer: Traditional media will not bounce back

Piggybacking on the previous article, Ballmer, speaking at the Cannes Lions Festival, reiterates that media is fundamentally changing, and that to date, only Google has figured out a profitable revenue model around new media formats. He adds that in the near future all content in all media will be digital. It’s only a matter of When.

Need Some 15 and 30 Second Spots? Hire Your User Base.

As if the top-down pressures listed above isn’t depressing enough for the ad industry, there’s also a sword coming in right at the ankles. The user-generated ad phenom is not only sticking around, it’s likely to increase. This year’s Super Bowl was enough of a warning, when the most popular ad (according to USA Today) was done by two brothers in Indiana for practically pocket change. Now here’s another good example of a company crowdsourcing what was once the bread and butter of the industry: 30 second commercials. And getting a nice spot out of it. Contests like this link are proving again that good work can be done for very little money and well outside the traditional agency structure.

John Battelle’s intro to the CM Summit

So with this sense of industry meltdown, what’s an agency to do? John Battelle (author of “Search”), kicked off his CM Summit with his version of the future of the industry and what agencies should be focused on. It’s a video, and you’ll want to skip to the point about 6:00. His prediction? In a nutshell, it’s all about going from ‘creative’, to ‘adding value’, and from ‘buying media’, to ‘creating media’.

Transformers – Revenge of the Fallen :: MMM’s campaign review

When major tent pole films like Transformers start going with minimal production on their websites, you know there’s a sea change going on. What’s most noticeable here is the expansion of brand tie-ins and partnerships. Not necessarily surprising, given the need for both movies and corporations to cut costs while still getting their name out.

Why Facebook Will Fail

I really appreciate a good contrarian viewpoint. I think there’s a lot of validity here, too. The fall in popularity of MySpace should be a warning to everyone. The key distinction to make is the difference between social networking and social networks. The former is here for the long run, I’d say. The latter is perhaps one of the most fickle online businesses yet. It’s not surprising that Facebook is pushing things like Facebook Connect, placing an emphasis on connecting people and having access to their data, versus trying to be the place where everything happens.

June 2009 Trend Briefing covering FOREVERISM

The idea that campaigns in a social media context don’t have an end point the way traditional push advertising does is very real. I’ve seen this  come up in social media campaigns we’ve run, in which a group we’ve engaged actually requests that the relationship continue after the campaign has finished. For an indusry accustomed to viewing media presence as a faucet you can turn on and off, it’s important to remember that the participants in the campaign may not be so ready to turn on a dime.

Furthermore, with any campaigns that take on a utilitarian role, there’s the issue of actually taking something away that you’ve given them and they’re now relying on. Brands are needing to extend their thinking further down the pipeline than ever, and at a time when that future is less and less clear.

Facebook Live Stream Box launched

We saw social viewing play out big with the Obama Innauguration on CNN/Facebook. This will make that type of activity much easier to impliment on a smaller scale. This is great news for brands with something to say and wanting the crowd to help them say it.

LG hosts texting contest, gets 250k entrants, held in Citi Stadium, and videod for a TV show

Fantastic campaign for LG. 250,000 entrants for a speed texting contest? What’s great about this idea is the lowest common denomenator factor (and I mean that in a good way). Texting is universal now. A very high percentage of people do it, so a contest like this is something a lot of people can relate to. The way they played it out live in Citi Stadium and videod it for TV shows good campaign support and viral anticipation/preparation.

Twitterature: 19 Year-Olds Score Twitter Book Deal

Essentially they’re taking a pile of classic books and turning them into the Super Clift Notes. Each boiled down to 20 tweets. That’s what they scored a book deal with. So, this means they’re turning books into tweets, and then back into books. Now on sale. No wonder the media world is screwed up.

Creativing :: Twitter either explodes, implodes, or both, and a great example of Facebook Connect’s power

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

Hurt, Trent Reznor Half-Quits Twitter

Trent Reznor, of whom I’m a big fan, has long been railing against the music industry’s control over artist and general heavy-handedness. And I’m pretty much in agreement on that. However, when he rolls out his personal life on Twitter, and it’s a 180 from the brand he’s been selling for the past 20 years, and then complains about fans not aligning with his new online personality, it highlights both the power and the shift these media technologies are creating. For years, the music industry, and the star system at large, has created a buffer designed to keep artists sheilded from this type of off-brand exposure. More than anything, his latest rant seems like a reminder to be careful what you ask for. It might come true.

Twitter Posts From Display Ads – Advertising Age

A new use of Twitter’s open API. Now brands can have tweets go straight into their ads. See above reference on being careful what you ask for.

Tweeting Too Hard

I’m glad someone called this out. There’s working it, and then there’s self-indulgence.

Twitter on Pepsi Can: Entering Mainstream or Jumping the Shark?

Not had enough Twitter news yet? Pepsi UK is printing tweets onto cans of their Raw soft drink. Raw product, raw news I guess.

Gamasutra: Kim Pallister’s Blog – The Most Significant Thing At E3 2009

With all the buzz around Project Natal, Kim’s pointing us in a different direction. The power of Facebook Connect and Twitter’s open login is creating instand communities around pre-built networks for friends. With Xbox Live, Microsoft has proven that core gaming is social. But the casual gamers aren’t there. Yet. Look to these login solutions to help make that leap.

Gawker – Yahoo Nukes Man’s Photos Over Obama Comments – Yahoo

A man posts political, disparaging comments and content on the White House Flickr account page, and Yahoo deletes his paid-for Pro account, without any warning, deleting 1000s of irreplaceable pics. Point 1) Remember that when you use the cloud, you don’t have as much control over the data. Point 2) Brands, like Yahoo in this case, need to be a little more sensitive to people’s information before they just go pulling the plug.

CMO job becoming a lot wonkier

CMO’s are relying more and more on data to drive their decision-making. One, it’s a bad economy, and bad economies usually create a more cautious approach to decision-making. Two, there’s a lot more highly-valuable data available now, and smart people are going to take advantage of it.

Next-Gen Creatives Focus on Web’s Data Detritus – Advertising Age

See previous link and realize that they’re the one’s approving or killing your campaign. As I’ve posted before, data can be a creative’s friend.

SnapStream TV Trends

On the subject of data, here’s an interesting tool for monitoring what keywords are used with what frequency on national TV. One obvious use is researching the rise and fall of trends.

Facebook Connect Used With Prototype Game Trailer To Integrate Profile Data

The creative showcase piece of the week. If you’ve wondered what the power of Facebook Connect type login’s can have on creativity, watch this. Logged in, of course.

selfcontrolfreak

Just a fun, creative use of interactive video.

How social media can resurrect your brand’s reputation

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My latest article just came out on iMedia Connection.

Recently on NPR’s Morning Edition, host Renee Montagne interviewed 20-plus year auto-exec-turned-industry-analyst Jim Harbour (to Jim’s credit, “industry analysis” must be the only growth sector in the U.S. auto industry for the past couple years). Montagne was quizzing Harbour on the problems the auto industry is facing.

Here’s an excerpt from their exchange:

NPR: What about the perception that U.S. automakers aren’t making cars as well built as foreign cars? How can U.S. automakers change the perception?

Jim Harbour: I am not a marketing expert at all. I don’t know how you change the perception of the American people who think we’re still building junk. And I know, I’m from the time that I was doing that. I was building the junk. We used to build cars with eight defects, and we’d ship them out and ship them to the dealer.

THE REST OF THE STORY …