DOUG SCHUMACHER

experience designer + writer

ugc

Creativing :: Great Google mashups, Craigslist postings as artworks, and fans ‘recreate’ Star Wars

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

87 Things from Google’s API’s

Eye and mind-opening overview of things you can do with Google’s API. This ranges from YouTube to Maps. Some of these you’ve seen, but overall a great span of mashup capabilities. This was presented at AdWeek in NYC last week.

Nightmare on Elm Street Remake Trailer Goes Viral on MySpace

MySpace’s EKG is showing some movement again. Their reposition as an entertainment portal may not be clearly defined or understood yet, but they’re showing progress where it counts — good content and visitors. Now, the “Nightmare” trailer is pulling a lot of viewership. The movie looks good, too.

Car Insurance: Comparethemarket.com’s Meerkat Is Brit Star

If they had award shows for strategies — well, at least exciting award shows for strategies — this would take home the gold whatever. The marketer is a car insurance comparison shopping site. Historically, a rather creatively bland category. Their challenge (besides a boring product) is that the keyword for ‘market’ cost $8 a click. Hard to get a good ROI at that level. So in comes a ‘meerkat’, which sounds close enough to ‘market’, and costs 8 cents a click. See where this is going? Now they just need TV spots to help people remember the term “meerkat”, associate it with “car insurance”, and voila, you’ve got visitors for 8 cents a click (and of course whatever millions you’ve spent on the TV spots). You can judge the TV spot for yourself, but this campaign has not only gained entry into pop culture in England, it has some very impressive brand awareness metrics behind it.

The NHL’s Latest Social Media Push: A Twitter Contest

Another great strategy, this time from thugs who ice skate and favor bad haircuts. While the NFL (No Fun League) is shutting down Twitterer’s, the NFL pulls a contrarian play and hosts a Twitter contest among it’s fans. Guess the winning teams each weekend, and win prizes. Simple game plan, smart strategy.

XPACS Dream Job Challenge

We’ve seen the ‘hiring via social media’ angle before, but this is definitely a new wrinkle. Like previous efforts, it’s focused on how well contestants can drum up buzz as qualification for the position. What I like here is, they’re quantifying the participant’s efforts much more thoroughly and more in line with what the real job will be like. And they’re also paying people who participate but don’t get hired, based on the impact they generated while competing. This not only seems like a smarter screening process for hiring, but is also fairer to the participants. Which only reflects back on the credibility of the brand.

Full Coverage: Apps for Brands Conference

Mobile’s hot. And probably getting hotter. And this is a good outline of how some brands are using mobile effectively.

Xtranormal | Text-to-Movie

If you can type, you can create an animated movie. The technology and interface is impressive — you’ll get the idea immediately in the 2 minute video. I think the application for this in terms of UGC contests, whether it’s for shows or commercials, is readily apparent. Right now a show like Family Guy could upload backgrounds, characters, and voice types, and have a UGC contest for show creation. Or at least a funny scene.

Internet Art: Craigslist Missed Connections Become Gorgeous Visuals

These are fantastic. If you’re not familiar with the “missed connections” concept, it’s people posting notes in hopes of connecting with someone they had a brief encounter with. These are public on Craigslist, so a children’s storybook illustrator has taken the text of the listings and created illustrations of the situation they describe. The artworks are beautiful — and the storybook style feels perfect for these missives of hope and fantasy. As a side note, the fact that people who want to randomly connect with someone out there turn to Craigslist is perhaps the single biggest testament to that website’s pervasive presence.

Star Wars: Uncut

Different groups of people joining together to recreate Star Wars, one scene at a time. The power of strong entertainment brands and User Generated Content.

Human Tetris

A crew of freeborders take over an SF street to create a real life version of Tetris. Simply fun.

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 :: 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 :: Social Media. Let the inquisition continue.

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I’ve been kicking around a couple of different approaches for posting here. One is to do a recap of what I think are the week’s most interesting developments in online marketing. I’ll pull a lot of this info from Creativing, the social bookmarking site I’ve set up where anyone’s free to post relevant marketing information (read: not spam). Thus I’m titling these posts ‘Creativing’.

This would be in contrast to longer deep dives on a more focused subject. Any input on this would be greatly appreciated.

So what happened this week? Nothing. So goodbye and have a great Memorial Day weekend.

jk

Actually, a couple things happened that are perhaps more continuation of previous trends than anything else.

Social Media Gets Shelled

Social media came under attack. Again. And not unjustifiably so. Fast growth demands questions, as everyone should have learned from the late 90s.

Regarding the Knowledge Networks study, true, most people don’t ‘go’ to social media sites for product information. I don’t go to TV for product information, either. Nor magazines, radio or billboards. But that doesn’t mean that there’s no opportunity for brands there, or that it’s not a valid environment for them to be in.

The fact that they state those sites are used for staying in touch with family and friends is an open door to even more opportunity for brands to get into the conversation. As long as they’re authentic about it.

Survey’s in which people answer direct questions about why they behave the way they do are, in my opinion, sketchy at best, and misleading at worst. Product decisions are laced with emotional overtones that are seldom captured in surveys. The minute we ask someone to rationalize an emotional process, it’s over.

Moving on to Facebook

Facebook announced the Publisher is being extended to Pages. What’s the big, you ask?

Facebook is all about sharing, yeah? Getting into that conversation thing. And this is simply extending the capacity for people to share things right off the Pages of the company’s they’ve Fanned.

Thus if someone’s on a company’s Page, and they see something they want to share (probably one of the most likely places to find such content, it should be noted), then they can post back to the company’s newsfeed, and to their own newsfeed (and friend network), right from that page. This could also be driven from an app.

Ever since the move last year away from widgets and towards the Newsfeed, Facebook has been pushing the thread of conversation. This is bringing brands into the picture more prominently than ever.

Of course, brands will still need to give people a reason to share it with their friends.

And more Facebook news.

Crushing data for MySpace this week. While the user base is still coming around, the engagement is dropping precipitously. Users are spending less and less time on the site. And when your site is all about social engagement, that’s pretty much the sign of the apocalypse.

To date, there hasn’t been a community or social networking-based site that’s been able to turn an ebb tide around. MySpace does have a lot more tools in their belt than the Geocities and Friendsters of past. But still, and I’m just saying.

Death of the Upfront, or just Jimmy Kimmel’s TV Career

While probably not the same cringe factor as Colbert’s National Press Dinner speech, I’m guessing there were some anxious ABC, no make that every broadcast and cable network in the country, execs on the edge of their seats. And further differentiation, there’s a big diff between slamming someone you slam on a regular basis on your show, and slamming someone you work for. I haven’t heard anything about this since, either. Does he still have a gig?

Best Buy Goes With the Crowd

There’s a lot of chatter in the business world about listening to the customer. So when Best Buy put a site up asking for constructive ideas for how to make BB a better experience, I was a bit skeptical. But putting up a site like this takes time and resources, and in this economy, doing so says something.

Sure, you could say ‘Why bring up what the brand is currently lacking?’ But there’s an authenticity to tactics like this that companies are highly in need of. No, there doesn’t seem to be that many people visiting. But sometimes brands need to do things that are worth more than the sum of the traffic or participation they drive.

If I had had a problem with BB in the past (which I have), this shows me that someone in the company with some pull is making strides to improve the brand experience.

Hope you have a good Memorial Day weekend.