Your Daily Dose of Drama

Madeline Bok

Europeans allow for a lot: dessert and coffee after lunch, 3-hour midday siestas, shoes through airport security, and commercial-less TV programming. Shows across the pond generally run from beginning to end without commercials, with a 7-minute break for advertising in between. As a result, TV spots aren’t the best way to reach European audiences because viewers often occupy themselves with something else between programs.

That’s why TNT’s latest European advertising tactic, “Your Daily Dose Of Drama”, was so impressive. In the middle of a quiet square in Belgium, a red button was placed next to a sign inviting passerby to “push to add drama.” When it was activated, an array of dramatic events unfolded in the square, including a mishandled cadaver, a shirtless fight, and a scantily-clad woman on a motorcycle. TNT found a way to take the commercial out of the television. The drama went viral and was named Creativity Pick of the Day by AdAge. The innovative idea attracted attention across Europe and added a dose of drama to the calmest of siestas.

Connecting the Dots

Austin Figueroa

According to a survey on SocialMediaToday.com, businesses asked about why they leverage social media sites overwhelmingly respond, “to connect with customers,” “to enhance visibility,” and “to self-promote.” Most realize the importance of an online presence: It allows for constant, and direct feedback, which makes a difference when it comes to sales. Just the other day I tweeted at Red Robin to ask if they had a veggie burger – It only took a minute for them to respond that they did. And it was delicious!

As a marketing student, the Four P’s are beaten into your head constantly – Product, Place, Price, Promotion. Product, Place, Price, Promotion. They’re all important for any brand. But when it comes to advertising – what I’m interested in specifically – Promotion is where my interests lie. But it seems like a lot of people forget to connect the dots: Promotion exists to explain the other three – differentiate the product, and explain the price, in the right place. And social media makes it easier than ever.

Personal Branding via Pinterest

Jessica Paro

Branded correctly, products can evoke certain feelings, and make us envision particular colors or styles. And people aim for the same thing every day: We brand ourselves through the clothes we wear and the way we carry ourselves. In the past, brands have had traditional advertising to broadcast their identities, but most people couldn’t do the same. Social networking has made “personal branding” a widely-realized concept, however, allowing us to share ourselves with the entire world.

Pinterest probably has the greatest potential for personal branding. With 11.7 million users, mostly 18-35 year old women, creating “boards” based on events, hobbies, and interests that are filled with self-uploaded photos, or “repinned” content from other users, it’s a visual means of self-expression that text-based sites like Facebook or Twitter can’t achieve. Pinterest caters to each user’s personal brand, enriching our generic information with the many facets of our personalities that make us unique.

Say Hi to the MU Ad Club!

Nick Woods

Greetings from Herenthout, Belgium! Since I’m busy eating fries and mayonnaise, and marveling at the 50 pound turkeys kept in the yard across the street from the house I’m staying at, this week we’ll be featuring a series of guest posts courtesy of Marquette University’s advertising students. They’ll be sharing their thoughts on the industry, as well as their own opinions on social media, and new trends that they’ve noticed. We hope you enjoy!”

The Other Side of the Pond

Nick Woods

To use one of the lamest catch phrases in existence, “I work to feed my family, but I play to feed my soul.” Typing that sentence out makes me groan, but it’s pretty true – Social media is what puts food on my own table, but if Napster had never existed, I like to fantasize that I’d be making my living playing guitar. About a year back, the band I play in was offered the opportunity to tour mainland Europe and the UK – And the people I work with were kind enough to let me indulge that fantasy. Over the next three weeks, things here are going to be a bit different, and you’ll get to hear from some other people with different ideas and perspectives than my own. I’ll be sure to check in on Monday, just to assure you I’m getting over the jet lag. And if you feel like following along, Instagram is a great way – I’m at @getpumped. Talk to you all soon!

If Likes don’t matter, what does?

Nick Woods

Stefan Olander is Nike’s VP of digital sport, and he has a new book out called Velocity: The Seven New Laws for a World Gone Digital. At its launch yesterday, Olander had quite a few stand-up-and-cheer revelations to share about social media in 2012, saying “a whole industry is stuck on trying to force old metrics on to new channels.” It’s a new way to beat a dead horse: The size of the audience matters, but size is for naught if you can’t engage.

Nike of course launched the Nike+ FuelBand a few weeks ago, technology integrated with their products that makes it easier for users to keep track of activity using a smartphone. And more recently, the brand launched an initiative allowing customers to bid on products using their logged activity. The point of these efforts, Olander says, isn’t to advertise, but to add value to something people already do. “Once you have established a direct relationship with a consumer, you don’t need to advertise to them,” he says.

Understanding the Need to Belong

BJ Bueno

“America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy,” John Updike once said, and it was with this in mind that I took in a debate between Johnathan Kay, author of Among the Truthers: A Journey Through America’s Growing Conspiracist Underground and Webster Tarpley, author of 9/11 Synthetic Terror: Made in USA.

I’m not particularly interested in the substance of the conspiracy theory, really, beyond a rock-solid conviction that Han shot first. However, this conversation went in a particularly interesting direction, examining in some depth why people are drawn to and choose to believe in conspiracy theories. Read More

C&A Fashion Likes

Nick Woods

Brazilian retailer C&A is bringing their Facebook presence into the real world with a new initiative that shows how many Likes an item has online, right on its hanger. It’s an awesome promotion for a number of reasons. First and foremost, C&A is enabling its digital community with a tool that can provide them with higher status – They are the ones determining what items are trendy, not a corporate entity. That engagement puts more C&A digital content higher in more user feeds, meaning more people outside the existing shopper community will see those items – Not only online, but in the store itself. And furthermore, it gives C&A administrators a concrete way to tie social media to the bottom line, simply by charting how well items with a lot of Likes sell in the store itself. It’s a human social media campaign, with measurable ROI. Where can we sign up?

What does The New Aesthetic tell us?

Nick Woods

Gizmodo posted a concise, useful update a few weeks back on The New Aesthetic – an (arguably) unconscious artistic movement detailed in a long essay on Wired, and during one of SXSW Interactive’s more well-publicized panels. Each discussion described the movement as an effort to express the tension between digital and analog, or man and machine. You probably don’t even notice its influence most of the time, but if you look, you can see it: Pixelated images are a standard device now in art and video. Advanced animation in the GIF format has proliferated. And photos of people taking photos are so commonplace it’s near cliche. These are all reflections on the relationship society in 2012 has with technology – One where irony and detachment often masks the fear of losing humanity in an indecipherable mass of 1s and 0s.

If there’s one thing the movement recognizes, its that people still value relationships and reality over digital identity. Which means keeping humanity in the digital space is of paramount importance, especially when it comes to marketing and advertising. How do you keep yours?

Klouchebag.com

Nick Woods

Turns out someone else has a low opinion of Klout too. After reading the same article on Wired we talked about last week, 27-year old Tom Scott decided to whip up his own response to what he calls “one of the worst ideas ever put online” – Klouchebag.com. In a short interview with Digiday, Scott argues that people who strive for a high Klout score are trying to “game an arbitrary and often-changing system. Imagine if all that time went into actually making interesting things, or caring about the people around you. To quote the WOPR computer from ‘War Games’: ‘the only way to win is not to play.’”

Klouchebag.com instead measures what you shouldn’t be doing on Twitter – ignoring those you follow, posting poorly written or negative-sentiment copy, or filling your feed with uniform, robotic, app-driven updates like those from Foursquare or Flixter. In other words, Scott’s site lets you know when you’re not being human. With any luck it’ll gain as much notoriety as the site it lampoons… But probably not with a name like that.

I have more Klout than the Aflac Duck!

Nick Woods

A feature on Wired.com this morning takes a “deep dive” (for lack of a less-dumb term) into Klout – Arguably the Web’s most important tool for measuring influence in the social sphere. After about a thousand words discussing the perks its users get, its use in hiring, and the self-worth people ascribe to their digital identities based on their scores, reporter Seth Stevenson came to what I think is a conclusion worthy of a standing ovation: “I found my eyes drifting to tweets from folks with the lowest Klout scores. They talked about things nobody else was talking about… no brand would ever bother to advertise on their channels. And yet, these were the people I paid the most attention to. They were unique and genuine. That may not matter to marketers, and it may not win them much Klout. But it makes them a lot more interesting.”

Klout might be a good measure of how many people are paying attention to you, but it’s not a great measure of humanity. And when it comes to social media, being human is more important than any mysterious, proprietary algorithm.

Is social media really social?

Nick Woods

If a recent article in the New York Times is to be believed, the myriad ways we connect with each other through 1s and 0s are actually killing our social skills. As MIT’s Sherry Turkle says, “E-mail, Twitter, Facebook, all of these have their places… But no matter how valuable, they do not substitute for conversation.”  It’s the same argument executives often make when pushing back against investment in a social media program: Who cares how many Likes our page has? That’s no substitute for a face-to-face meeting in the real world.

Your boss, the reporters, and the researchers are all correct – It’s tough to form a real, fruitful relationship with someone exclusively in a digital space. I agree: That relationship is ultimately more important than any hasty transaction. But as Mathew Ingram points out this morning, it’s easy to see that those who are social online tend to be social offline too. Which means online connections often spark offline connections. It all goes back to a point we’ve made before: Marketers need to resist the temptation to sell in the social space. Focus on bringing your online network into the real world instead.

The Olympic Athletes’ Hub

Nick Woods

When it comes to social media, people are more likely to follow people than brands. So when putting together a marketing strategy that involves Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, etc., it’s often a good starting point to ask who you want to showcase, rather than what. Who do your customers want to hear from? Partners? Employees? People just like them? Or some kind of combination? There are a lot of possibilities.

For a company like Apple, Steve Jobs – an executive – was the answer. For an event like the 2012 Summer Olympics, it’s the athletes. That’s why a site like The Olympic Athletes’ Hub is such a great idea: It’s a site that organizes every athlete’s social media presence into one central location, giving fans a direct link to the people they want to talk to and hear from. It makes communication easy. And more importantly, it’s a tangible link to the brand – The Olympics are about the competitors, and the spectacle. Letting the audience become a part of the action is a compelling way to build trust, loyalty, and community.

Why Facebook acquired Instagram:

Nick Woods

Facebook is in the business of data, and Instagram provides a lot of it.

Obvious isn’t it? Maybe, but it’s the truth, no matter what the “tech gurus” and “social media sherpas” tell you about why the former acquired the latter for $1 billion last week. Instagram was the first company to make sharing photos on the go easy and stylish. And in this case, simply being the first has put the company ahead of every other mobile photo-sharing service (including Facebook itself, arguably) when it comes to its number of users. Users = data. And more data = better insights for advertisers, where Facebook makes all of its money. It’s about as simple as that.

Caine’s Arcade

Nick Woods

Nirvan Mullick’s short video piece, “Caine’s Arcade,” has been the internet’s darling over the last few days. It’s a pretty heartwarming story that’s worth the 11-minute watch if you haven’t seen it, detailing a 9-year old’s work building a series of cardboard games in his father’s East L.A. auto shop, before going viral. In less than 24 hours, supporters raised over $100,000 for Caine’s college fund. And in five days, Mullick’s video has been watched over 2 million times on Vimeo alone.

Mat Ingram at GigaOM has a great article this morning discussing how Caine’s Arcade is more than just another feel-good story about the power of social media though. Specifically, he points out a small group of raging evangelists can make big things happen, if there’s passion and humanity in the story. As he concludes, “Caine’s story proves that sometimes if you build it — no matter how improbable or crazy or unrealistic it might seem — people actually do come. And that is something worth celebrating.”

The Second Screen

Nick Woods

Think back a few years, and try to remember how exciting digital cable was when it first rolled out. At the time, providers were explaining the endless possibilities that the new technology could enable – The ability to stream more data to your TV meant content previously only available on formats like DVD could now be paired up with live content. More options meant a more customized viewing experience. But flash forward to 2012, and little, if any, of that promise has been fulfilled. Social media and mobile technology have taken care of it instead.

CNN’s Julianne Pepitone wrote yesterday that 68 percent of tablet users say they’re using their devices “several times a week” while watching TV. That means the demand for integrated, extended content on television falls more and more every year, as long as Americans have an iPhone, iPad or Android at their fingertips. As Pepitone says, “slapping a Twitter hashtag on a commercial or hawking a Facebook page in the corner of the screen during a TV show, is becoming passé.” When it comes to advertising, it’s a trend that might mean shifting our focus from the content broadcast on the big screen, to the community enabled by the small one.

Project Glass

Nick Woods

Google has certainly made a big splash with its just-launched augmented reality initiative, Project Glass. At least my Facebook timeline, and two million YouTube views would have me believe it. But when it comes to parades like these, there’s always rain soon to follow, and already the experts are poo-pooing, and the comedians have found a new subject ripe for parody. It’s probably good to keep things in perspective, but come on, they’re future glasses! Can’t we all agree to at least have fun thinking about it for a little while?

As Harry McCracken says his article for Time, “Even if the glasses that Google is testing are rudimentary, even if they’re annoying, even if they just plain stink — they’ll still be far more interesting than the Fantasyland version in the Project Glass video. Because they’ll be real.” What the detractors forget is that even if you’re looking at an idealized, corporate vision for an untested product, it still boosts belief to imagine it actually existing. That’s a big shot in the arm for any organization.

Wikidata

Nick Woods

For large organizations in 2012, getting answers isn’t nearly as difficult as asking the right questions. Larger retailers can use a customer’s purchase history to nearly predict the future. But consumers, without access to that kind of data, are at a disadvantage – You and I don’t have access to years of demographics, and the technology to make sense of it all. For us, answers are a lot harder to come by.

The Wikimedia Foundation is aiming to change that with their first new project since 2006. Wikidata, according to this morning’s TechCrunch, will be a machine-readable, user-editable database of information, and it begins development today. The new service will allow users to ask questions like “What’s the average price of gas between New York and Los Angeles?” and then download that data themselves into a spreadsheet where they’ll be able to manipulate information without the aid of another agency. That’s an important revelation: Big Data is often a subject that makes eyes glaze over, but with projects like these, we can expect the informed consumer to become downright clairvoyant. That’s worth every marketer’s attention.

People Follow People

Nick Woods

Quick question: Is it easier to have a conversation with a logo or a person?

A brand can do a lot for a product – inspire belief, trust, loyalty, and community – but when it comes to the practical mechanics of engagement, it’s tough to imagine an actual person having an actual conversation with a can of soda, or a stack of paper detailing an insurance policy. That’s why in the age of social media, a lot of companies are turning back to the mascot. It might sound hokey, but yesterday’s Wall Street Journal explains that providing an entertaining, human voice can often drive traffic to a page better than sound public relations.

We’ve said it before, and we’ll say it again: Social media is best used to create a community, not to sell products. Customers that use Facebook or Twitter want a relational, not a transactional experience. They’re more likely to follow characters than brands. So this week, you might ask yourself: Where is the humanity in my product? And how can I bring it to life?

#Kony2012

Nick Woods

In the past five days, Invisible Children’s 30-minute documentary, Kony 2012, has racked up over 80 million views across YouTube and Vimeo. It’s one of the highest-trending global topics on Twitter, and it’s the subject of millions of Facebook status updates. It’s a textbook example of how social media can disseminate an idea quickly – In this case, a message that has a growing faction of detractors who claim it dumbs down a complicated issue, in the service of an organization with motives that are ignoble at best. Which side of the fence do you stand on?

Whether you think the campaign exists in service to the children, or to company executives, it’s undeniable that the phenomenon Invisible Children has stumbled upon will bring information about the issue to a larger audience. And building those kinds of metrics means more than revenue: People are drawn to big numbers – Politicians in particular. And even if the organization itself doesn’t make a difference, if five people out of the 80 million who watched their video do, then maybe the piece is more worthwhile than many give it credit for. The bigger question: What specific action will those five people take? Will it really solve the problem? And at what cost will it come?

Animated GIFs: The Birth of a Medium

Nick Woods

Following YouTube’s move toward more traditional programming, PBS posted a short, 7-minute documentary on the site yesterday called Animated GIFs: The Birth of a Medium. It’s a great, succinct examination of an art form enabled by old Web technology, but proliferated because of new media. And while the subject matter itself is interesting enough – check out Cinemagraphs.com when you get a second – on a deeper level, the fact that a video piece like this was designed exclusively for online consumption is itself a wink to how the world consumes content in 2012. (#meta.)

Tweeting while driving = 100K followers (apparently)

Nick Woods

Following a jet fuel explosion during the Daytona 500 yesterday, Brad Keselowski – a driver with ~85,000 followers on Twitter – picked up his phone, and started tweeting. By the time the delay ended, less than two hours later, Keselowski had gained an audience of over 100,000 on his page. Just goes to show how original, exclusive, and timely content from a credible source can spread, and how once again, creation wins over curation.

Facebook’s Premium Ads

Nick Woods

The world’s most popular social network has what I think is a pretty exciting new vision for online advertising, leaked this morning by Fast Company. Text ads like those you see on the site now, and on other spots like Google, aren’t exactly renowned for their click-through rates, or their reliability – A banner on Facebook is most effective only when a user seeing it also notices his or her friends have Liked it. It’s looks like a lesson the company has taken to heart though: The new scheme brings more content from a brand’s page into the ad, letting users see not only if their friends have liked it, but what’s being discussed on the page’s Wall. Furthermore, users will be able to interact with the page from the ad itself – The extra steps of having to click the ad, find what you were looking at, and engage again are all eliminated.

We’ll see how this plays out, but the company is claiming an 80% boost in recall, and a 40% increase in engagement.

Mobile data is a big deal (duh)

Nick Woods

Turns out that a lot of people are using their phones on the internet. Who’d-a thunk?

Cisco released a report yesterday that it’s calling the “Visual Networking Index (VNI) Global Mobile Data Traffic Forecast Update” (?) discussing some of the company’s projections for growth trends relating to data transferred over cell phones, tablets, and other devices like them. A few of the more insane stats:

• 2011′s mobile data traffic was 8x the size of the entire global internet’s in 2000
• Average smart phone usage nearly tripled in 2011, and over 1 million smart phone users will be transferring more than a gigabyte of data apiece each month within the next five years
• By 2016, there will be 1.4 mobile devices per capita, and 2/3 of the world’s mobile data traffic will be video

Big Data and Biological Downloading

Nick Woods

Remember a few weeks back when IBM announced they wanted to create a mind-reading computer within the next five years? And remember when you thought “oh that’s nice” and then immediately forgot about it, because that’s too insane to imagine? Well, it’s not, because researchers at UC-Berkeley were able to decode actual words out of raw brain activity during a series of experiments last week. Maybe it’s not so dumb to start worrying about the implications.

A question to consider apart from standard privacy concerns: What does this kind of technology mean for Big Data? We’ve already seen a factor-9 increase in online information since 2006. Imagine how much you’ll have to read if the effort of typing a thought into a computer is eliminated, and instead every idea is published automatically. Mashable said in an article this morning that Facebook’s IPO proves an immense thirst for human connection, but mind-reading takes it to a new level.

What does $5 billion do?

Nick Woods

Late yesterday, Facebook finally filed an initial public offering seeking to raise $5 billion. Over the next few weeks, we’re going to learn a lot of interesting stuff about the world’s largest social network as they open their books, and address speculation that the organization is worth almost $100 billion – right behind McDonald’s, which sits at $101.5 billion. What does that $5 billion mean for users on the site though? Not much, at least in the short term. A big chunk of the money will pay off investors that have kept the network afloat, while another portion will go toward low-risk investments to make the company more financially secure. Also, Mark Zuckerberg will soon be classified as “insanely rich,” an upgrade from “ridiculously rich.”

There’s an interesting sentence in the Use of Proceeds section in Facebook’s filing, however: “We may use a portion of the proceeds to us for acquisitions of complementary businesses.” It’ll be interesting to see what the network’s newfound wealth will allow it to buy. While we aren’t going to see much of a difference in how we use the site tomorrow, who knows how this IPO will alter it 10 years from now.

The biggest tech IPO in history

Nick Woods

Rumors flying around the internet say that Facebook will announce its initial public offering any day now, the prospect of which has brokers salivating, but not necessarily the rest of us. Not yet at least – But I think it’s interesting to think about what $10 billion in investment can mean for the  network’s customers (and Mark Zuckerberg).

There’s a great infographic, “Everything You Need To Know About Facebook’s IPO,” that’s been making the rounds over the past few weeks – You can check out here. Some highlights:

• Experts predict Facebook’s IPO will be worth more than three times Google’s, Groupon’s, LinkedIn’s, and Bankrate’s combined
• The company as a whole is predicted to be worth $100 billion – more than McDonald’s, Amazon, and Disney
• Despite all of that, Facebook’s projected revenues for the end of 2011 are $4.2 billion, which Apple makes in only 3 weeks

One Hour Per Second

Nick Woods

I’m still a bit skeptical about YouTube as a replacement for traditional TV (obviously), but it’s fascinating to consider some of the stats surrounding the site. Google knows it – That’s why OneHourPerSecond.com exists. Browse through the clips they’ve posted, and you’ll learn a lot about just how much video YouTube is handling these days. Some highlights:

• If you waited 1:36, and then watched all of the videos uploaded to YouTube in that time, the Sahara Desert would have expanded by 500 feet
• Apollo 11 could reach the Moon in the amount of time it would take you to watch all of the content uploaded to YouTube in 1:15
• 3:45 of uploading would provide enough material for retirees on a cruise ship to do nothing but watch YouTube all the way from L.A. to Tokyo

4 billion views a day

Nick Woods

Yesterday, Google reported a 25 percent traffic jump on YouTube over the past eight months of its service, claiming users are now streaming 4 billion videos from the site every day. According to Reuters, Google says roughly 60 hours of video are now added to the site every minute, compared to the 48-hours-per-minute rate it clipped at back in May 2011. That’s roughly a whole year of content every 2.5 days. Wow.

Those are big numbers, but they might be a bit misleading when you consider the type of content typically posted to YouTube. In 2010, the average length of a YouTube video was 4 minutes and 12 seconds, compared to network and cable programming which runs 22 minutes, or 44 minutes, depending on the length of the program. That translates into a lot more time spent watching regular ol’ TV – Indeed, Mashable reports that the average YouTuber spends 15 minutes a day watching videos on the site, while the average American spends 4-5 hours watching the tube. The death of traditional TV this isn’t – But we’re getting closer. All hail Hypnotoad.

Creation > Curation

Nick Woods

At the DLD conference in Munich today, Tumblr CEO David Karp was asked about the role of content curation vs. creation on his site. By his reckoning, 90 percent of users on the network spend their time reposting material they find interesting instead of creating it themselves – An imbalance that spells definite advantage for artists, musicians, and publishers.

“[Original content] has a huge digital footprint,” Karp says. That’s an understatement: Tumblr has 41 million registered blogs, and when you consider the stat above, only about 4 million of them post their own material. The average original post on Tumblr is reblogged 9 times. That makes a pretty compelling case for coming up with your own material, instead of piggybacking on someone else’s.

SOPA & PIPA

DeChazier Stokes–Johnson

On January 24th the Senate will begin voting on two bills, the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) & the Protect IP Act (PIPA), which if passed would change the internet as we currently know it. It would also stifle business development, job creation and innovation. I agree piracy needs to end but not like this. All that’s needed is a little good ol’ fashion creativity, not unwarranted censorship…because all that will lead to is more piracy.

Today is SOPA Blackout Day & Day of action where various sites on the web have blocked or blackened their sites in protest. The most popular is WikiPedia. Google has also created an End Piracy, Not Liberty splash page with more information and an online petition…and have also gotten into the spirit.

This Is Why I’m Broke

Nick Woods

The world is full of stuff you never knew you needed – Jet packs, shark-shaped personal submarines, bacon-flavored candy canes… The list is pretty much endless. And that’s why ThisIsWhyImBroke.com exists. It’s a blog devoted singularly to the pursuit of awesome stuff you can buy on the Web, that’s more interested in maintaining a sense of humor and the integrity of the site than a giant mailing list to sell useless nonsense. Because if there’s one product that’s the antithesis of “useless nonsense” it’s a mini-quadricopter that can be remote-controlled with an iPhone.

Beyond Farmville

Jim Palmer

In an interview posted yesterday on Socialnomics, former Game Director at Acclaim, Steve Altman, discussed his new startup, Socialtype. Altman says he is attempting to “introduce a form of advertising that doesn’t suck” for game developers, by providing new enterprise tools that enable players to easily share game experiences with their favorite social networks. Altman’s service takes advantage of the trust that exists between two friends, which is greater than that between a consumer and a brand they don’t interact with. By leveraging those relationships to drive engagement, the new startup might might help gaming companies take a step in the right direction in developing trust between themselves and new customers.

SVPPLY

DeChazier Stokes–Johnson

I’ve been a fan and an active member of SVPPLY since the first day it went live. I’d used a bunch of other sites to try and keep digital lists of things, but SVPPLY has done a better job of keeping the site’s design understated and simple, and the social aspects useful. The best part is that SVPPLY lets you see what your friends are adding to their lists, which makes it easy to add new stuff to your own with one click. If you end up creating a profile, or already have one, don’t be shy - add me.

Drinking From The (ahem) “Fire Hose”

Nick Woods

New research covered in The New Zealand Herald last week claims the amount of digital information we produce has grown by a factor of nine over the last five years. That’s a crazy amount of growth. Consider, for example, a typical low-volume fire hose ejecting 90 gallons of water per minute. Grown by a factor of nine, that same fire hose would spit out 400,000 trillion gallons of water per minute – nearly 9 billion times the amount of water that flows over Niagra Falls in the same period.

So maybe it’s time we reconsider our phrasing. Trying to drink from social media’s proverbial fire hose in 2006 was difficult enough when the comparison was apt – Today, trying to pull meaningful insight from the stream shouldn’t be considered a challenge, but a death wish. How do we as marketers begin to deal with that onslaught of data, much less help customers?

A Little Costs Alot

DeChazier Stokes–Johnson

If there’s one person I can’t stand, it’s the guy who can’t laugh at himself. And in the end, the same goes for agencies. So it shouldn’t be any big surprise that Agency Spy called one of them out yesterday, not for posting a potentially (albeit accidentally) hilarious music video from one of their creatives, but for deleting the comments folks on Facebook made about it. That’s Social Media 101: most are unforgiving and unfiltered from behind a computer screen. So you had better be ready to respond to the good, the bad, and the vulgar – with a smile on your face – if YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn are channels you’re considering.

Airbnb

DeChazier Stokes–Johnson

In short, Airbnb let’s guests and hosts choose the experience they want to have. Want to get away for a weekend, week or even a month without breaking the bank? Airbnb allows people to list their homes so that people who are looking for lodging can rent a room, use of the entire home or even have the place all to themselves. There is a feedback feature on the site that allows you to read the experiences others have had with any home. You can check it out here.

Paul Rand

DeChazier Stokes–Johnson

Twitter as an educational source. We all know about Paul Rand but we may not all know about Paul-Rand.com. Last week while checking out Twitter one of my friends posted a link to the site and I was blown away. Tons of Paul Rand awesome at my fingertips. Logos, identity presentations, standards, manuals, guides, articles, interviews, videos. You name it and it’s there. I particularly enjoyed the identity presentation. It’s always interesting to see how the greats presented their work to clients.

Watch The Throne

DeChazier Stokes–Johnson

Listening to and reading all of the critique of the new Jay-Z & Kanye West album Watch The Throne has been very interesting and exciting. To me, any great body of work sparks passionate and sometimes heated debate. It also begs for a side to be selected, rarely do you experience gray area. People either fall in love or detest. Questlove, of the Legendary Roots Crew, wrote an “Official Unofficial Review” which is the best piece of commentary I’ve read on the album so far.

Are Great People Overrated?

BJ Bueno

Is it a better decision to hire one super talented person or to spend your time, energy, and resources creating a strong team of moderately talented people? Facebook’s recent hire of George Holz, reputed to be one of the computer programming’s world’s super talented people, has sparked a lot of conversation on this very question.

We thought it might be interesting to consider the issue from the Brand Modeling perspective.  Our goal is to understand and meet the needs of our Brand Lovers better than any other organization. With that in mind, there’s no aspect of our business that’s more critical to our organizational success than the quality of the people who work with us. READ MORE

5 Ways To Boost Marketing

Mark Evertz

Quick social marketing junkies, switch on your iPads, bust out your styli and jot down the name of  the next great marketing panacea. For lack of a better term, we call it – Bro-cial Media. But you can call it whatever you want when you present it as your own in your next big client presentation. READ MORE

Chitwood And Hobbs

DeChazier Stokes–Johnson

Chitwood & Hobbs is a blog dedicated to sports, culture, passion and the desire to compete. Presented with a very clean, easy to navigate design aesthetic and little known interesting facts about sports in the 60′s, 70′s, and 80′s, Chitwood & Hobbs is easily one of my favorite conceptually well executed sports sites.

Inspiring Word Of Mouth – Integrity

Bill Eisner

A couple years ago, I was asked by nonbox partner BJ Bueno who is also the co-author of The Power of Cult Branding, to help contribute to the writing of , Why We Talk, The Truth Behind Word-of-Mouth. We came up with seven governing principles for inspiring WOM. The first is INTEGRITY. Essentially, people know you have an intention, and that you’ve figured out they known you have an intention. What this means from an advertising standpoint is that they know you’re trying to sell them a product, and you are aware they know they’re trying to be persuaded. Unless you get very adept at meeting their needs, you’re going to encounter a nearly-impenetrable barrier. READ MORE @beliefbrandman blog.