DOUG SCHUMACHER

experience designer + writer

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Creativing :: The IRS and LAPD give social media the stamp of approval

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

Scale: The Importance of Cafe-Shaped Experiences

A good excerpt from Chris Brogan’s new book “Trust Agents”. It speaks to how the scope of much product development and it’s related marketing is downsizing, or going niche. And with both products and marketing going less mass, it requires a more personal touch. That effects profitability for sales and cost-effectiveness for marketing. The challenge of doing more for less is all-too-familiar in marketing circles today. This article is a bet that won’t be changing any time soon. It’s an interesting dilemma, because the big question many marketers have for social media is its scalability. Companies accustomed to running national mass media campaigns who then try social media as a more personal approach to marketing often report the lack of a blip on the radar screen of sales or traffic. Perhaps the mass media model will need to take further hits in acceptance or credibility for this trend to completely play out. Or, maybe social media will find new ways to scale the impact of more personal conversations. Whatever the case, a more personalized approach takes time and diligence. And companies accustomed to mass media who try to bring that mindset to social media are likely in for a difficult transition.

Apple – Movie Trailers – Art & Copy

I’ve seen this going around the web, and apparently it opens today in a few small markets. While Mad Men will broaden the appeal of this, it’s still likely to be a special interest movie. I’m curious how soon films like this will go straight to online viewing. If they could get 5% of the ad industry to see it for $2, I can’t imagine there aren’t profits to be had.

New Site for CMO’s

CMO.com. Curious what they paid for the URL. Launched by Omniture, they’re accepting content submissions, but seem to be mostly aggregating at the moment.

New Facebook Privacy Policies Will Have A Significant Impact On Platform Applications

I’ve been writing a lot on privacy issues lately, which is odd for a creative guy. But I’m confident these issues are going to have a strong bearing on creative capabilities, particularly in social media, over the next several years. Seriously, most people have no idea what information is out there on them, and how easily it can be dug up. Facebook seems to be taking the self-regulatory approach that the alcohol and tobacco industries have taken for years. But they have their challenges. Reading Facebook’s Privacy Settings section reads like the Ts and Cs of most websites. So I’m not expecting people to really take this over for themselves. Facebook in general isn’t known for it’s great user interface, so I’m curious how they’ll handle such a complex issue with a mass audience in time before this blows up.

Is ‘Friending’ in Your Future? Better Pay Your Taxes First

On the subject of Privacy, you may be surprised to know that the IRS is hanging out on social media sites, looking for confirmation or contradiction of your latest filing. Seems like small potatoes stuff, but tax revenues for the government are at devastatingly low numbers due to the economy. They’re looking behind the sofa cushions for loose change.

LAPD releases security cam vid of break-in at Lindsey Lohan’s house

Speaking of government agencies using social media, LAPD released this break-in video. On YouTube. While this makes sense, I think the big story is, the IRS and now LAPD are both using social media to improve their performance. Yet as recent surveys have shown, there are still CMOs of major corporations that aren’t convinced that social media has a role to play in their marketing efforts. Interesting.

New campaign for CWs “The Vampire Diaries”: Tying cause marketing with for-profit business objectives

Not every marketing story can have an ‘green’ or ‘socially conscious’ angle to it. But here’s a TV show tying into the Red Cross as a way to promote both. I like this as a way of bringing a heightened social awareness to the campaign, which feels compassionate and relevant in troubled times like this.

Justin (shitmydadsays) on Twitter

A pretty good story. A simple daily Tweet of what a 28 year old overhears from his 73 year old dad. And the growth has been remarkable. I first noted this last Tuesday, when ‘Justin’ had 53,000 followers. Earlier this morning, it was at 149,000. It’s now over 151k. Like Daily Candy, it’s simple in structure — just one posting a day. A good reminder that an impacting message doesn’t have to have large budgets or extensive production timelines. There was a rumor that this was tied to V Australia, which I’ve not been able to confirm. However, if this does turn out to be marketer-driven, I’ll be curious to see both a) Who it’s for, and b) How people will react.

Cheese and Burger Society

Fun site from the Wisconsin Cheese council. I’m always up for a new burger or sandwich recipe. I do think there’s a lot more they could have done in the way of social interactions around this site, though. But good content all the same.

Photoshop Artworks

Striking photoshopping applied to portrait photography.

Creativing :: YouTube educates reporters, more proof of Facebook’s impact, and mobile continues building momentum

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

YouTube – reporterscenter’s Channel

I mentioned YouTube going local with video news reportage last week. This is a support site providing tips for those content producers. Smart way to increase quality of content and build community.

Facebook Search Improved for Everyone

With the attempt at buying Twitter and then acquiring FriendFeed, Facebook has made it clear they’re serious about real-time search. When I think about how often I’ve seen something on Facebook and couldn’t find later to reference, I don’t think there’s any question this is going to be a great improvement. And Facebook’s highly-customizable privacy settings are part of the capabilities: I’m  convinced online privacy issues are going to be major. But most importantly, there’s little doubt at this point about the value of friend and network-based information. With Google search results, it’s a great place to start researching a product or service, but certainly not conclusive or that trustworthy. That gave way to user reviews like Amazon and Yelp. But we’ve seen how easily those can be gamed. The value of being able to rely on people you know and trust is obvious. It’s also interesting to see a marketing tactic come along that’s closer to the purchase decision point than Google Adwords: Assuming marketers have been able to get into those search results. And therein lies the greatest potential of social media.

Facebook’s Click-Through Rates Flourish … for Wall Posts

On the subject of the value of friend referrals: Striking new data out on how people respond to Facebook wall posts. Apparently, quite well. Of course it matters what’s in that wall post, but the online world hasn’t seen 2-40% click-through rates since oh, maybe the first banner in 1994? Of course I have to cringe at seeing the CTR as the metric of evaluation. This is a mixed bag. Social media needs metrics to convince a large number of CMOs, according to a recent survey. Yet the click-through dragged online marketing’s branding potential down to a DR mindset from which it’s never fully recovered. I’d like to think marketers are more sophisticated about the online space at this point, but when the battle is between clearly-defined data like the CTR and more nebulous inferred data, the case is anything but closed.

“Augmented Reality” Is Also A Form Of Search

Search is quickly becoming a lot more than typing a few keywords into a search engine. From voice driven search to location based filters to augmented reality interfaces, it’s good to keep in mind that people are finding out about information in continually-diverse ways. The mobile phone has already driven much of this, and we’re only in Act 1 for that technology. Given that search in whatever form it’s employed is so central to a campaign’s performance, it’s not something creative marketers can ignore.

Chris and Malcolm are both wrong | A continuing discussion about freemium content

Great expansion on the debate between Chris Anderson of Wired and Malcolm Gladwell of Outliers on whether or not the future of content is free or paid. This post, by Brad Burnham, Fred Wilson’s partner at Union Square Ventures, sees truths and flaws in both views. At some point, the whole discussion moves into a debate about the economics of abundance, particularly in terms of content development. It’s ultimately a debate about the scarcity of resources, which has been written about as early as 1971.

From the post:

“In a world where facts are readily available, from multiple sources, basic information will be commoditized. But the explosion of sources will create a real burden for the consumers of information. Raw information will become not just a commodity, it will be a nuisance. In that world, consumers will value scarce, relevant insight over abundant facts.”

An interesting point is that users of a site like Facebook, or even Twitter, are not just using the system. They’re adding value to it. They’re the filters that help people sift through the mass of information being created. So should every user of Facebook or Twitter be paid?

Need to Deposit a Check? Try Your iPhone

I’m all over this. Take a photo of your check and email it in. Get the deposit. Destroy the original check. It seems fraught with fraud opportunities, yet the cashed check always leads back to an account that someone has set up with identifying information that banks have to be vigilant on. There’s no question they’ve thought that part of it through. I hate using cash because it means going to ATMs, and only periodic checks aren’t auto deposited. We’re getting closer and closer to never having to go into a bank. Which has to be a big help to their profitability.

Wells Fargo Labs

Given the previous link, no wonder Well Fargo has a Lab. This is their attempt to create what Seth Godin calls a purple cow. Adding the remarkable to a product or service. Give people something to talk about (presumably on their social network sites). For many companies, this is the new marketing.

LocaModa – Mobile posting to Out-Of-Home displays

The concept of posting to a large public display from a mobile phone has been done before, but now it’s transitioning from a customized experience to something you can buy more like media placements. Wiffiti is another player in this space.

ddɐ ʞooqǝɔɐɟ ʇxǝʇʎɯdılɟ s,ʎɹɹǝɾ & uǝq

Thought this was a fun app, by Ben & Jerry’s. Simple, intriguing, and highly visual. This technique was used on IMs a year or so ago, but with social media now hitting on all cylinders, there are still legs in the idea.

Thinking Space

With so much emphasis on social media, a lot of the attention in marketing has moved away from Flash. And certainly the large Flash sites of the past 5 years. But Flash can create powerful experiences, now more than ever. This is an exceptionally clean site that combines what few sites can: A beautiful, elegant and distinct navigation that’s also intuitive.

Creativing :: New ad formats, the end of privacy as we know it, and YouTube gets local with the news

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

Is Persistence the Key to Web Branding?

A number of ad networks are working on display ad models where they keep the same ad on the page for a much longer duration. I like this change of focus. Publishers have been going for quantity – trying to show as many ads as possible – instead of going for quality. Literally running viewers through a more cuircuitous path than necessary, to increase impression counts. The net effect is people are exposed to a lot of messages they can’t recall, versus something they can’t forget. Hopefully this, combined with larger ad sizes, will give publishers the boost in revenues they need.

Ads Follow Web Users, and Get Deeply Personal

Speaking of publishers needing to monetize their traffic. This is about the merging of online and offline data. The creep factor on this is that the offline data companies like Experian have such extensive demographic information about us – like home value, credit rating, the car we drive – and the online tracking companies have a lot of behavioral data based on how we’re moving around the web and the sites we visit. Put those two together, and you have an intensely personal profile available to marketers. Bring in Facebook profile info, and you also have a lot of information about personal taste and interests. This merger is possible due to cookies, of course. In the past, tracking via the so-called 3rd party cookies has been tolerated because of it’s anonymity. They knew a lot about the sites you were visiting and the ads you responded to, but little else. But now, all of this data comes together: With your name and social security number attached. On one hand, I’ll be shocked if there isn’t a big backlash in the near future about the amount of information available to marketers. On the other hand, in a terrible economy with an already-struggling ad model, tracking is a huge factor in serving effective ads that can be sold at rates the publishers desperately need.

False online reviews draw suit from NY

This story should rip through the social media community. The NY Attorney General settled a law suit with a cosmetic surgery company for posting fake product reviews online. While this should be good news for the social media marketing community at large, it does seem to open up a big can of worms. I mean, Amazon is full of fake book reviews. Yelp has a lot of suspicious restaurant reviews. In a social media world where everyone is a brand with the potentail to be a pitchman, this should get interesting, and certainly complicated from a legal standpoint. But this really underscores the power of social media in general. When people lost trust in corporations, they trusted other humans, even if they didn’t know them. With that relationship in question, the most reliable and trustworthy product information they’ll have will be their friends and their network.

Izea Launches Sponsored Tweets

Is there a difference between a company paying an unknown individual to write a positive review and a company paying a well-known individual to write a positive review? In this case, I think there is. For one, you have full-disclosure with the Izea posts. And someone who’s writing career is based on credibility does have to maintain certain standards. Some people see this as a pact with the devil, but with bloggers needing to pay the rent just like their newspaper counterparts, I’m sure this will only increase in popularity.

Go Cloud, Young Man

A good explanation from a range of perspectives on the impact of cloud computing. While the overarching tone is opportunity, it’s lace with dire warnings about pending changes in business.

Now on YouTube – Local News

The new section on YouTube is titled “News Near You”, and it serves up videos from your area, based on your IP address. They’re getting some local TV stations to participate, and doing a rev share deal with them on ad sales. But of course, with citizen journalism getting easier and easier – the new iPhone video cam actually has a ‘send to YouTube’ button to post in 1 click – some news organizations are understandably concerned. If news scrapes, blogs, and RSS did in newspapers, how  different is this as a replacement for local news on TV? And I’d say that video is a more easily replaced form or reportage than articles.

Inside Best Buy’s Augmented-Reality Ad

You’ve probably seen various forms of AR, or augmented reality, where you print out a piece of paper and hold it up to your computer camera and voila, something that looks like a hologram comes into view on your computer screen. Overall, this seemed to work very well for them. But I think there’s a big first mover advantage to new technologies like this. After the first wave, expect response rates to drop, and certainly the press will stop covering them.

Beauty Of New Technology: Users Personalize Before-And-After Ads

There’s no shortage of examples of places you can insert a headshot of yourself, and suddenly you’re a pirate. Or a Transformer. Or a Simpson. Etc. Etc. This is taking that idea and applying it to products as a way of reviewing them. At first glance, this looks pretty cheesey. But don’t underestimate people’s interest in seeing themselves within the context of a new product they’re considering purchasing. Even if it’s very crude.

Seth’s Blog: When tactics drown out strategy

A good reminder that just because you can do things quickly in new media doesn’t mean you should.

Cool Navigation

A photography site is a challenge for navigation, because it’s a bit hard to describe a photographer’s style, especially in the few words that navigation requires. So in this case, they simply used photos. A nice way of using a standard like navigation in a fresh way that enhances the experience.

Creativing :: Catching crooks with an iPhone, YouTube makes bands money, and a Twitter post leads to a lawsuit

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

I now pronounce you monetized: a YouTube video case study

You’ve seen the JK Wedding Entrance Dance video, now read the case study. This is what YouTube and everyone else who isn’t a record label has been saying for years. That associating your music with emotionally-powerful user-generated content is good for sales, not fleecing the artists. Labels should be thankful they don’t have to a) pay people for developing this content, b) spend the money to drive the traffic to support 10 million views, and c) pay the video streaming bandwidth fees.

New Report Suggests Facebook Has Replaced Email For Sharing Content

I’ve previously reported on how Facebook is driving sharing and traffic, but here’s additional proof. What’s particularly reinforcing is that the two sharing apps have such similar data. Perhaps most telling about the power of Facebook and community in general is that they’re driving all this sharing, and their email app pretty much sucks.

Southern Comfort Pours Entire Media Budget Into Digital

Yep, the whole enchilada. I can’t recall a major brand that’s made that leap yet. And this from a distiller in Kentucky, no less. Their logic is right on. If you want to sell to the people going out to clubs and purchasing spirit-based drinks, the Web is a great place to be.

Tweet Sentiments – Know Who’s Tweeting About What When Where & How

Probably more fun than functional at the moment, but pulling sentiment data out of massive text chunks is going to be huge for both target marketing and market research. So not a bad thing to stay on top of.

Twitter post leads to lawsuit

Perhaps inevitable. Chicago apartment management group Horizon is suing a Twitter user for stating their apartment was moldy, on Twitter. Now, they may have a point, but if they settle this at all in their favor, it’s sure to be a Pyrrhic Victory. The woman Twitterer had 20 followers. Just 20. And Horizon went and turned this into a national spectacle. D-U-M-B. Not to mention there must be a zillion companies in the US named Horizon, so even for those searching for Horizon for whatever reason, this Tweet probably would have been buried. Then, in the middle of the media storm, one of Horizon’s owners explains their lawsuit to the Chicago Sun-Times: “We’re a sue-first, ask-questions-later kind of an organization.” D-U-M-B-E-R.

Winery’s ‘dream job’ idea leaves an aftertaste

A winery in NoCal posted a job opening for a “lifestyle correspondent” to spend their days blogging, tweeting, and singing the praises of their winery from beautiful Healdsburg. $60k for 6 months work. Not bad in a bleak economy. And like a good social marketer, they encouraged participants to promote themselves and the brand by soliciting votes. Several social media experts jumped on board, with one amassing far and away the most votes. But the winery didn’t even include him in their top 50 finalists. A social media community backlash ensued. As Digg founder Kevin Rose said: “You can’t ask the community to help you vet candidates and then just disregard what they said”. This campaign was essentially a knock-off, me-too version of the Australian “Best job in the world” campaign from earlier this year. And I think this demonstrates that you can knock off someone elses idea, but that doesn’t mean that you get the idea. And I think it’s especially true in social media that it really helps to understand the emotional dynamic of the campaign you’re running.

Marketers Get Valedictorian to Plug Movie in Speech

A studio pays a high school valedictorian $1800 to mention one of the catch phrases from the movie in her valedictorian graduation address. They video taped it, and then pushed it for viral success. The results? Not much viral activity, and a pissed off school district and high school administration. Personally, I understand the annoyance, in particular bringing commerce into a graduation ceremony like that. But at the end of the day, it’s seems pretty harmless, and a bright student has some additional money, which she’ll certainly need attending MIT.

New York Nearest Subway augmented Reality App for iPhone 3GS

There have been some similar examples of compass and location-based services popping up, and keep in mind this requires the iPhone to be jailbroken. But a great example of where things are headed.

Busted! Thieves Caught by MobileMe’s Find My iPhone

Great story. A 15 yr old and his dad are on a river trip and get back to find their car broken into, and the kid’s iPhone among the stolen items. He had the MobileMe Find My Phone feature, so he got the location and called the cops. Turns out it was a family they’d been trying to nail for a while. Cops arrived and reclaimed the stolen goods and arrested the culprits. Case closed.

Creativing :: 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.