The new face(s) of social media are practicing their potential

Contribution. Sharing. Interests. Passion. Talent

The new faces of social media are sharing their passion and talent in forums that make the seemingly impossible possible. How do you go beyond words to express your love of something? How do you connect your contributions to those from people in over 100 countries simultaneously? How do we obfuscate technology and deliver community experiences that create engagement levels never before seen and at the same time give people a reason to stay up late, practice their potential and ultimately share this with the world?

We do it by delivering an experience that fails to describe itself, and instead offer a single point of entry and action (similar to the iPod 'wheel' or the Google Search button) that allows for a common and shared experience that is immediately accessible - in this case "Create Your Own".

I give you first exhibit A - the new faces of social media - and if you click on any one of them (below) you will see what they shared just minutes or hours ago at the Jonas Brothers Vocal Booth. Forget the technology for a minute and focus on what was going through the minds of these very passionate community members from all around the world as they sang along with their favorite boy band, crush in, and hearts out.






Consider a few things as you ponder this - this wall of faces represents a very small 1-2% of the actual tens of thousands of participants who engaged in the experience. Beyond the bravery to share their version of a song sung by their heroes with their heroes and thousands of fans who are tuning in to watch the versions (many visitors now watch as many as 20 or more of the videos) they also overcame network, technology, bandwidth and hardware issues that would daunt most of the leaders in this space that are more than twice the age of our contributors here. It is one thing to soapbox, but it is indeed quite another level of sharing to sing when you are up on it.

These days we too often focus on the why or the how and not the what of social media. And when we think about the who, it would be great to focus on who really benefits from all the work, theory, technology and effort that goes into building great experiences.

These are a few of the new faces of social media. As a parent we can be proud of our children safely sharing their talent and passion with the world at large, and in my very humbled opinion they are worthy of nothing less than a standing ovation of heartfelt applause for their considerable effort and passion.

Sameness-izing

The tongue in chic moments...

Do you find that you spend a lot of time making sure that everyone around you is on the same page as you these days? Are you attending meetings, jumping on calls, blogging, tweeting and generally communicating out an infinite volley sameness for the masses - doing your best to attain and maintain consensus and deliver a root understanding that will ensure you can boldly go where everyone else has already proven you can go? How are you differentiating yourself while doing this at the same time? What makes you special or unique or ensures you add additional value if you homogenize everything around you to a level playing field?

I would seriously consider whether or not it is even possible to completely sameness-ize without considerable effort (or the right lack thereof) and if instead your attempts might result in just giving up any visible leadership you had just to have your ideas and needs be a little more palatable to those around you. To support this I thought it might be prudent to think about examples of good efforts at sameness-izing that are going on around us all the time.

How to sameness-ize your life with five easy repeatable activities:

1) Read as many top ten, twenty, thirty, forty ways to do XXXX as possible (this is a top 5 list so it will not count towards your overall score).
2) Follow every link that everyone sends you always - make sure you check that everyone else around you has followed or seen the link as well.
3) Comment on every post where everyone else is commenting. Either debate and object, or if possible just get your l'il old brown nose right on in there.
4) Re-post, re-tweet, re-link, re-share and re-hash as much as possible.
5) Make sure you find out what everyone else is attending and go there too (then write about what you saw that everyone else saw too).

This moment of unacceptable sarcasm and trite bitterness has been infrequently brought to you by "The Un-Coalition to Retain Individuality" - an exclusive club that now has billions of chapters worldwide, BUT each with only one member.

Ask yourself this. Has the crowd, in fact, been crowd-sourced? Or are a few of us still playing solitaire in the back row in a last ditch attempt to have an outcome all our own.

Twitter Fountain

Found this interesting widget over at http://twitterfountain.nl that mashes your twitter search stream and flickr photos.

Also made one for Overlay.TV

Portable Social Graphs - Facebook Connect, Razorfish Weighs in.

I have been thinking a lot about how to integrate Facebook Connect into distributed or viral videos, especially those that end up embedded or distributed with Overlay.TV, and I came across this provocative deck from Razorfish on the subject that warrants sharing - you can embed or share it freely with or without this post.

Portable Social Graphs - Imagining their Potential

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: retail marketing)

In my humble opinion (sometimes ;-) the social graph implemented as an overlay on embeddable video graphics will radically change how we find, research, watch and share video content. The byproduct of this sharing and viewing - the reviews, ratings, and comments about content or products in the video - will become more relevant since you get the information from your own network.

We often describe a video platform as a media endpoint - imagine being able to intelligently scatter these endpoints across the web and reconnect the dots through the relationships that viewers bring with them wherever they travel.

That is the power of the graph.

Overlay.TV and the Jonas Brothers lay it on with some very hyper video

If you didn't know this already, I work for a very hip video startup based in Canada called Overlay.TV.

Today Overlay.TV announced a new project that has gone live with Jonas Brothers, the internationally acclaimed platinum recording artists that first climbed to the top of the charts in 2007.  The brothers essentially found a new way to connect with their fans using a new online vocal booth application, an idea that I helped to mature with the Overlay.TV team (and judicious and thoughtful input from some teenage JB fans who were shown early ideas) from the original karaoke widget that we built on Overlay.TV. 

I want to stress that this is live for a limited time only, but more importantly that in the short time it has been live that we already seen tons (marketing speak for not sharing any numbers yet) of fans of the Jonas Brothers singing along with the band online while they watch the video for their latest single, "Lovebug," in this first-ever use of interactive video technology in this way.

Sing Along with Jonas Brothers

Brian Ressler from Hollywood Records referred to the project as a first for online video tools and a new medium for fan interaction. 

"Response to the Jonas Brothers Sing A Long has been fantastic and bringing fans new, highly innovative experiences within these online video tools provides a fun and engaging way to express creativity and interact with the bands they love," said Brian Ressler, for Hollywood Records. "Kids have always loved singing along with their favorite stars, and now we're giving them a chance to share that with the world."

The Jonas Brothers' Overlay.TV Vocal Booth and the core karaoke features available in any video that gets embedded in the Overlay.TV player ultimately define the new level of interactivity we can expect in online music videos, allowing fans to jump right into the action with their very own rendition of an additional vocal, guitar, keyboard or drum track.  All fans need in order to participate is a webcam and a microphone.

Check it out at www.jonasbrothers.com/singalong/, fans, go ahead and record their very own vocal accompaniment to the Jonas Brothers as many times as you want. Once saved, their submissions are reviewed by the Overlay.TV content panel for appropriate content, and are then made available to the world right there on the Jonas Brothers' official website.  You can grab the link to your specific version if you want to share it with your friends.

This reminds me of the Guitar Hero and Rock Band series for ton of reasons, but there is one key difference.  People are actually recording themselves singing along with the band and then sharing the results well beyond the living room.  Karaoke and singing along with our favorite bands is nothing new as Ressler points out - but culturally we have amped this up to a whole new level over the past few years, in part because of these games, and in part because of social media.  Put it together and you have a perfect storm of talent and sharing capability.

This is important on another front - validation of Overlay.TV as a highly flexible, scalable and customizable platform for the delivery of very unique video experiences.  As we continue our work with customers, agencies and publishers over the next little while I really feel like I have found a true culmination of my background in agency, publishing and online technologies, and am excited to be back behind the podium for a platform that will enable very rapid mashups, applications and use of video in interactive online applicatons in a whole new way.  User commentary, user questions, asynchronous conversations and more are enabled as a fourth wall on a video and add personalization that ultimately makes it more relevant and personal to the recipient of a shared link.  It is really nothing more than a very talented and passionate comment, made in the voice of the content itself, but the natural evolution does not make it any less significant in my opinion.  But then, I am biased right?  Maybe. 

At the end beginning of the day we launched an interactive video platform that takes interactive video well beyond hypervideo and that is an important milestone in the evolution of online video.  

I look forward to moderating your versions.  Please add the link to your version to any comments you make on this article.  :-)

Dance Monkeys Dance

This 2006 archival footage still rings true as it explaines how the monkeys do stuff.



Overlayed at Overlay.TV

Ads of the World

Thanks Georgie! And thanks to Ivan Raszl for posting this.




An ad about George W Bush. More ads about Bush here: http://creativebits.org
Client: http://AdsoftheWorld.com
Advertising Agency: BBDO Ecuador, Guayaquil

Visit Ads of the World at:
http://www.adgabber.com/groups/group/show?id=546804%3AGroup%3A10871

Overlay created at Overlay.TV

Between the crosses, row on row

Take some time today to remember.



Thank you.

The Truth and Lies of Buyology

"Sex doesn't sell." In fact, people in skimpy clothing and suggestive poses not only fail to persuade us to buy products - they often turn us away.

This is the controversial finding of "Buyology: Truth and Lies About What We Buy" which has just been released by Doubleday, and is the officially published result of a three-year neuromarketing study by author Lindstrom.

The single most important element of this book is the thesis that consumers are driven by subconscious motivations and that the majority of the decisions we make every day are basically taking place in the part of the brain where we're not even aware of.

This soon-to-be-controversial book breaks a bunch of myths about marketing, and one of the most important ones is that cigarette warning labels make people want to smoke more, not less.

Part of the study involved warning labels placed on cigarette packs. Researchers asked test subjects if the warning labels that are mandatory now on most cigarette packages actually worked. The answer was a resounding "yes." A different group of researchers studying anti-smoking ads had earlier found that this line of messaging had the same counter-intuitive effect.

Another research study done earlier by Brian Wansink also looked into the subconscious aspects of buying behavior and the importance of brand.


"Buyology" digs into a couple of areas that we take for granted - product placement and brand. Research proved that product placement doesn't always work. In one example, they looked at product placements in "American Idol," they found that Coca-Cola was far more effective at captivating consumers than Ford Motor Co., even though the corporations similarly paid more than $26 million on their campaigns. And, when looking into the importance of a brand's logo, the book points out that brand image is not as important as many have held it to be. It may actually be that the importance is declining, and that things we hold true may be changing due to increased awareness and transparency. I see it around me every day when people refer to Coke as a "soft drink brand" where previous generations would have regarded it simply as a drink.

Buyology is must buy for any reader that wants to get beyond the noise of marketing today, and dig deep into the science of why the things we do work the way they do.

BBDO Shanghai pitches female staff members as D-cups

Angela Natividad just posted this video on Ad Gabber. Apparently BBDO/Shanghai say that all its female staff members are D-cups.

I like Angela's take on the post (which I could not get away with saying so I am quoting). "Finding three young D-cups in all of Asia is a feat, which alone made the video worth watching. I also like the effect the cheesy music had on this slow exploration of the Shanghai office. It made all that leering look less ... leery."


Find more videos like this on AdGabber


Asian Mad Men rise up.

Akamai about to light up Acerno tracking capabilities

Akamai has just announced the launch of Advertising Decisions Solutions, which they say will work with any of their existing clients to "apply behavioral-targeting layers to ad campaigns," reports Advertising Age.

Acerno, a predictive modeling business, which Akamai bought recently for $95 million, tracks user buying habits across a number of ecommerce sites, then apparently applies a new algorithm to predict what they might buy next — and serve ads accordingly.

Repurchase and loyalty programs are already very sophisticated. One that I worked on in the past integrated purchasing information from WebSphere, statistical information processed in Omniture and dynamically modified and delivered messages through a Responsys email system. This definitely resulted in purchase and repurchase lift, but it was very hard to attribute that lift to purely the technologies in play. Sometimes customers just come back and buy other stuff.

This solution from Akamai seems to go further in that it promises that this information can somehow be shared across multiple sites and advertisers, and I trust that Akamai is no "dummy" when it comes to all things privacy. What I found most exciting was the apparent promise that this information would be shared on a pure performance basis, in exchange for

The system that I worked on across multiple vendors was definitely not paid for with performance dollars. It was expensive to setup and maintain, and while it definitely had ROI, it was not risk-free as this promises to be.

This begs a few questions.

How does this differ from Deep Packet Inspection technologies that make this type of information available to site owners and advertisers, but has met with resistance from privacy advocates?

Doesn't this sound like the e-commerce equivalent of Facebook's beacon?

How do you feel about being tagged in your purchase flow and re-marketed to based on what you do?

Akamai shall offer the service to publishers, ad networks and advertisers, taking a cut of revenue gleaned from purchases resulting from the ads.

Great brand experience at the expense of brand experience

By definition a brand experience is an isolated unit of experience created beyond the traditional destinations for information on a brand, but is that definition holding true in the online world? There are not infinite creative opportunities for things like BMW Films, or its self-proclaimed heir apparent, the recently gone beta Lexus' L Studio that provides a forum for a completely unique form of branded content engagement. Not every brand has the budgets required to produce a film series and drive busloads of engaged eyeballs into an online landing experience, or the stomach to resist turning it into a direct response vehicle at the expense of the standalone success of branded content.

On the other side of this equation the only real advertising opportunities that you can buy on major eyeball destinations in order to provide temporary immersive experiences are the interstitial (read "Click Skip or Next ASAP") or the dedicated landing page advertorial content that gets blended into the clickstreams and traffic reports of any of the major or minor portals/media brands that are surviving from this income.

How do you stand out in the crowd? One of the better innovations I have seen of late is an example whereby one brand, technically a sub-brand of a major brand, convinced a major online brand to give up their user experience in exchange for one key return favor - cash. Apparently this approach works. I am not going to spoiler but I am going to set you up to better understand what this might entail if you decide that this amazingly creative use of agency resources and media planning is just the thing for you.

Any potential media outlet has several things that you can consider when brainstorming well outside the box to try and drive engagement and perhaps the odd award or two for your well-paid efforts. It should be no surprise to you that you do not always have to fit in the IAB-sanctioned ad unit specifications, but it will be a surprise to many how far some portals are willing to go to be a part of something really creative or unique. I know. I have worked on many major portals and professional content brands and if the idea and the budget are there then the sky is the limit.

Let me be clear. The plan is to completely take over a portal user experience with your own brand experience (your customer's brand is fine too) and derail the user into "total" engagement.

Lets break the considerations down:

1) Site users: Look at the demographic and behaviors of a site and determine how open you think they are going to be to having their reading, browsing or viewing experience hijacked.

2) Site depth: Determine how many pages will not be impacted in a typical viewing session - this lets you ensure the media brand that all is not lost when you completely take over with your dastardly plan. If a site only has a couple of page views per visitor, they are going to be much less likely to let you completely "hack" the clickpath.

3) Site traffic: How much. How random. From which sources. Typical enter/exit paths. All of these things will let you build out a plan that will not only drive traffic to what you have in mind, but ensure that site users can back out or move on if needed. At the same time, you do want to stop them, so pay attention to how you are going to get them there in the first place.

4) Existing ad model: If a site is already doing a plethora of branded content but has relatively similar models for every brand that is present, then your idea is going to grab massive mindshare. If you are throwing your chips in a stacked deck, you will be splitting the take.

5) What you do: How are you going to get users to visit, stop, engage, click and what compelling event are you going to exhibit to ensure that the visitor stays and loves the choice they made to do so.

Now that you have found the right crowd doing the right thing in the right place that is open to new ideas for what you have in mind, you're all set. As solid as your plan is, you now have to execute with exacting detail, coordination and an eye to the quality of what you will output. And you have to do it fast, because the sales team you just talked into this is already thinking of ten other customers that they can bring to the table.

Intrigued? Think it's a good idea? It is. And below is one of the best examples of this I have ever seen.

Nintendo did, and they talked Goodby into making an experience for Wario that YouTube completely got behind. This will win awards (unless the awards shows are cancelled) and has already generated massive discussion in the industry.

http://youtube.com/experiencewii is what you are looking for if those links don't work.

You don't have to go that far of course. There are a myriad of ways to take over a page, a site or a clickpath and to engage the users. Offerings from EyeBlaster, VideoEgg, and others are completely targeted at major brands that want more than text, popups, banners and in-streams - and know that they have to work a lot harder than most if they want to get through to even the weakest infections of ad blindness wrought into the ad marketplace.

What are you waiting for? Why are you still reading this?

Get out there and figure out how you are going to do it.

And when you're ready, why not see if you can talk to my incredibly talented team here at Overlay.TV into helping you get it live. ;-)

FOOTNOTE: Visceral reactions abound for this campaign, ranging from pure fandom to carefully pointing out technical issues and specific error messages generated by different browser/OS combinations.

Don't do this at home (unless you have an agency in your basement) and don't do it all if you are looking for a "zero-fallout" situation.

Bring on the trumpets

Every day there is something new to look at, something new to try, and somewhere new to post stuff. In the past two weeks I have signed up for at least 15 new social networking services, covering everything from blog formats, posting sites, linksharing sites, twitter clients, twitter add-ons, twitter look-a-likes and more.

One thing that sticks out for me is how hard it is to make noise about new services, and how hard it is to get people to notice something. Even if they do, what are the chances they will stick around.

I'm sure every one of these start-ups has at least one board member or marketing guy (wait, that's me) like the guy in the video below who wants more noise, more attention and more fanfare when things launch, but I wonder when it all becomes such a symphony of cacophony that we recognize it as a tune. And the tune goes like this - hey, people, do whatever. It's all good. Maybe not yet.

Bring on the trumpets.

Poke more than one in four. Many tweets on the wane.

A report from eMarketer today rolled up research from Synovate and Universal McCann basically clues us in that more than half of adults across the world don’t know what a social network is, 58% to be exact.

Based on surveys with 13,000 people in 17 countries, the study investigated online behavior and attitudes towards social media and networks. The good news, methodologies aside, was that at least 70% of Americans know what a social network is, which is much higher than the overall average. Canada however has a higher percentage of adoption. Overall membership in the Synovate survey stood at 26% of all adults with variance between countries with high membership rates that seems to pattern in a way that would be consistent with the network effect - more friends online means more adoption.

More interesting to me was the size of the dissatisfaction in the market that was expressed as the % of respondents who were losing interest in social media. Not only was it somewhat surprising that since this is still a relatively new phenomenon and therefore seeming to wane in interest very fast (one would call this a fad), but more importantly that the intent of those who were aware to join a social network was less than the percentage of users who were losing interest.

What is your take on this study?

Not everyone is pokable, that's for sure. And, I know that this will impact attitudes towards it.

* Countries in the study: Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Japan, Netherlands, Poland, Russia, Serbia, Slovakia, South Africa, Taiwan, UAE, USA

Sporty Explosions from Quiksilver

Quiksilver shows that they still know how to draw an audience online - and that they know how to get the attention of the YouTube generation with this latest viral hit. If you can't find some surf in your locale, these surfers have found a way to make it happen. The volume and langy is a bit hot in this video - you were warned ;-)




Do not try this at the cottage.