Internet Marketing Blog

Twitter In Plain English

Another of Lee Lefever's wonderful CommonCraft In Plain English series videos came out in March last month, this one about Twitter:

Dakota County YouTube Video PSA Contest

I've been helping out on a YouTube video PSA contest project that is sponsored by the Dakota County Public Health Department, called Respect My Ride. The purpose of the campaign was to encourage Dakota County teens to pledge to keep their cars smoke-free.  The video contest encouraged teens to create a 30-second public service announcement promoting the same message.

In addition to YouTube, the campaign made use of Facebook, MySpace, and Flickr in in trying to reach teens. The contest winners were announced yesterday. The remarkable explosion of creativity that social media has unleashed never fails to amaze me. This project was no exception.

The following playlist includes all the entries to the contest (the first three are the winners, in order):

Congressional Hearing On/In Second Life

I missed this but better late than never. Jon Stewart lampoons Congress and Second Life on The Daily Show and, as usual, they nail it:

Citizen Branding On The Campaign Trail

The viral videos just keep coming for Barack Obama. The most recent is Baracky: The Movie in which Obama and Clinton are injected into the storyline of the movie Rocky, to amusing effect. This is another example of candidate branding by someone other than the campaign iteself.

By inserting Obama into the Rocky roll, he is being portrayed simultaneously as the challenger and the champ. In the movie, Rocky plays an upstart but everyone knows he ends up as champion. It's a nice bit of work:

Moby's Movie Music Marketing

  Moby Rocks The Guitar 
  Originally uploaded by wacky doodler

Late last year, the musician Moby started a web site called Moby Gratis that offers some of his instrumental music for free to independent filmmakers to use in their nonprofit movies. If the movie gets purchased, then you'd need to pay a small licensing fee, the proceeds from which would go to pay for a charitable foundation devoted to this free film music site.

Moby Gratis is a source for his music to be used essentially under a Creative Commons copyright license. It provides wider exposure to some of Moby's music that would inherently have a limited audience because it is instrumental and it provides a free resource to independent filmmakers.

Pretty cool. Here's Moby talking about it and about his views on copyright law in general:

Arthur C. Clarke & The Importance Of Visionaries

The passing of Arthur C. Clarke last week got me to thinking about the importance of paying attention to the visionaries of the world, to those people who think about about the future and try to look beyond the horizon.

Clarke obviously fit the definition of a visionary. He is widely credited with proposing the idea of satellite communications in 1945. The themes of evolution and artificial intelligence that he explored in such stories as Childhood's End and 2001: A Space Odyssey are well worth keeping in mind as our technology becomes ever more powerful and sophisticated.

While I think we should pay special attention to visionary thinkers society-wide, they are particularly important to those of us in the fields of communications because they can get us thinking about where technology may be headed and therefore, how people will use technology.

iPods and DVRs, for example, have fundamentally altered the way in which people receive information by making messages portable and delayable.

I've been planning on writing about books that I think are important to Internet marketing folks, so let me mention a few writers I'd suggest to help think about the future:

• The books of Alvin & Heidi Toffler, especially Future Shock, Powershift, and The Third Wave
• Generations and The Fourth Turning by William Strauss and Neil Howe
• The stories of Phillip K. Dick
• The novels of William Gibson

Are there others you think are important? Add yours to the list in the comments.

Flexible, Wearable, Adaptable Computing

The Nokia Research Center and the Cambridge Nanoscience Center have been collaborating on a ubiquitous computing concept called Morph. The most fascinating thing about the concept is that the nanotechnology could allow for flexible material that can become rigid on demand.

Hulu Does Online Video Right

It is with relief, gentle reader, that I report to you that some mainstream media companies have figured out that sharing your content online benefits online fans and media companies alike.

As you faithful readers know, my biggest aggravation is when media companies refuse to allow their content to be shared. Hulu is offering ad-supported video content from more than 50 media companies for free and they are allowing it to be embedded.

They've done it right. So, happily, this time I get to appauld rather than complain. The selection of TV shows and movies is not bad but you'd think there would be a lot more to choose from fifty contributors. The quality is superb and definitely check out the HD gallery (it is stunning how crystal clear the high-def video looks and plays).

This is a segment from C|Net TV's First Look show, featuring a review of Yahoo! Go 3.0 Beta (which, by the way, inexplicably does not work on Windows Mobile PC [David said, bitterly]):

See Also:

• Mainstream Media Inching Toward Embeddable Content
• MTV's Online Music Video Marketing Strategy
• Will Google's Video Ad Network Expand The Embeddable Web?
• AOL News Beta Integrates Social & Conversational Media
• NFL.com Redesign - Web 1.5
• NBC Finally Offers Embedable Video Clips...Sorta
• NBC's Botched Response To Natalie Portman Online Video

Microblogging In Plain English

I am a huge fan of the microblogging service Twitter (which, by the way, explains why I was so upset when my estrategy Twitter account just up and stopped working and Twitter ignored my pleas for help. I'm still fairly bitter about it, but, you know, sometimes you just gotta move on. I have another Twitter account, so if you want to follow my Tweets, go to twitter.com/derickson.). I am also a huge fan of plain English. Anyone who has followed this blog for a while knows, therefore, that I'm also a huge fan of Common Craft's In Plain English series of videos. Their latest is about--tah dahhhh!--Twitter. Enjoy:

See also:

 
• Social Networking In Plain English
• Social Bookmarking In Plain English
• Wikis In Plain English
• RSS In Plain English
• GoogleDocs In Plain English

How Search Engines Work Video

Though this is a 2005 UC Berkley lecture by Dr. Marti Hearst, most of the lecture is entirely relevant and up-to-date today because search technology has not fundamentally changed since then. The lecture is entitled Search Engines: Technology, Society, and Business:

Citizen Journalist On The Scene At Bar Fire

When most people think about citizen journalism, the overcompressed, jerky cell phone video images come to mind. While it's certainly true that those type of images often represent citizen journalism, as we've seen with the Minneapolis bridge collapse, that is not always the case.

This is another remarkable example of not just citizen journalism, but the quality citizen journalism can reach. A popular Minneapolis bar I've hung out at on more than one occasion called Maxwell's caught fire and burned down yesterday morning.

Twin Cities blogger Ed Kohler at the scene, cameras in hand, shot still photos, some video, and posted the results to his blog, The Deets, as well as to his Flickr account. Here's the video he shot at the scene:

While the quality of these images are of traditional journalistic standards, what strikes me the most about citizen journalism is the You Are There quality it tends to convey and which seems to be missing from mainstream media coverage. Perhaps that's because of the packaging that comes along with MSM reporting.

It feels sorta like Edward R. Murrow reporting from the rooftops of London during the blitz (RAM).

Online Branding In The 2008 Presidential Race

The 2008 presidential race has been called the YouTube election and that is certainly hard to dispute. There have been numerous examples of YouTube videos playing a significant role in the race for the White House.

In each instance, the YouTube videos attempted to brand a candidate one way or another and to varying degrees of success.

Pre-YouTube

The first instance of YouTube-like online branding of a politician in Minnesota, and, perhaps, nationally, occurred during Norm Coleman's 2002 campaign against the late Senator Paul Wellstone.

At the outset of Coleman's challenge against Wellstone, a couple of young Minnesotans launched the now defunct BushBoy.com that featured a hilarious Flash animation depicting Coleman as George W. Bush's lapdog and, literally, hand puppet. The animation used actual clips of Coleman speeches and played on Coleman's close relationship with the White House. I cannot, unfortunately, find the actual animation. The site was instantly popular. It worked so well because the piece exploited some essential truths of Coleman the politician: He was handpicked by Karl Rove to run against Wellstone and he had big monied supporters.

BushBoy.com was followed by JibJab during the 2004 presidential election with a Flash animation that lampooned both George W. Bush and John Kerry. Again, the satire was so effective because it absolutely nailed if not essential truths, then perceived truths of both candidates:

YouTube Politics

Prior to YouTube, you had to be pretty motivated and needed not just some technical expertise to create popular online political satire, but enough marketing savvy to build awareness. When YouTube launched in February 2005, it provided an easy way to publish satirical political videos and offered a centralized, ready-made audience for them.

Senator George Allen's Macaca Moment

What's more, YouTube ushered in the era of citizen generated media, offering a platform and an audience for raw video shot by individuals. During this presidential race, that fact played out most prominently when a worker for the James Webb senate campaign caught his opponent, Senator George Allen, using a racial slur when referring to the Webb volunteer.

Allen was considered a front-runner for the 2008 Republican presidential nomination. The Webb campaign uploaded the video to YouTube and it soon became news, with television reports airing the video itself. The widespread exposure of that video branded Senator Allen as a racist. Subsequent reports of Allen using racial slurs and his awkward attempts at explaining the video simply solidified the perception that he was a racist. Allen lost his re-election bid and, as a result of the video, was no longer a viable presidential candidate.

Rudy Giuliani in Drag

It's an understatement to say that Rudolph Giuliani faced an uphill climb in securing the conservative base of his party during his bid for the Republican presidential nomination. Conservatives saw no difference between him and a liberal Democrat. Though Guiliani failed for a variety of reasons, it certainly didn't help his cause when someone uploaded video of the former Mayor of New York in drag and flirting with Donald Trump. The video reinforced Giuliani's brand as a liberal:

Big Mother Hillary

The Obama campaign's mashup of the 1984 Apple Macintosh commercial was effective because for years Hillary Clinton has been pummeled (and branded) by her right wing critics as cold, distant, and a big government socialist:

This is the original Apple commercial:

Which, coming full circle, is based, of course, on George Orwell's novel about totalitarianism, 1984:

The Clinton's Soprano's Spoof

Riffing off the finale episode of the final season of the immensely popular HBO show The Sopranos, the Clinton campaign spoofed the finale with a lighthearted version of their own. This piece was fascinating because people tended to read into it what they wanted to see. Supporters of the Clintons saw it as a laudable attempt to show people Hillary's lighter side. Clinton critics, on the other hand, thought it entirely appropriate that the Bill and Hillary would compare themselves to a crime family. In this case, branding was in the eye of the beholder:

This is the original ending scene from The Sopranos:

Pretty Boy John

The Edwards campaign had to be mortified when a clip of the candidate appeared on YouTube that showed him obsessing over his hair, reinforcing the perception of John Edwards as a pretty boy:

The negative branding from that video was so successful that the campaign felt obliged to address it with a self-effacing video of their own for the YouTube debates:

Mitt's Many Faces

The rap against Mitt Romney has been that he never met a position he wouldn't change, if it were politically expedient to do so. And if you had any doubts, YouTube was there to remind you that Romney once held the polar opposite positions he now holds:

I Got A Crush On My Candidate

Barack Obama has been the biggest beneficiary to date of online branding through YouTube. When Barely Political launched the Obama Girl video, the branding of Obama as a sexy candidate easily took hold because he is a very charismatic man. The video has only been a positive for the campaign:

With the phenomenal success of I Got A Crush On Obama, Barely Political followed up with Obama Girl vs. Giuliani Girl:

Too Hot For Hillary

The Me Too videos followed shortly after the Obama Girl made such a big splash but not always to the benefit of the candidate. Taryn Southern, for example, released Hott 4 Hill, containing a rather obvious lesbian theme:

Huck Me

The Huckabee Girl video mocks Republican candidate Mike Huckabee's belief in Creationism:

Yes They Can

Finally, Barack Obama again benefits from independent online branding with the Yes We Can music video featuring musicians and Hollywood stars singing along to an Obama speech. The video brands Obama as an inspiring, lyrical, poetic speaker. Again, the branding is effective because it's true:

Who Needs Swift Boats?

Forget 527s, the new Swift Boat Veterans are going to be even more opaque than the shadowy groups of elections past. If you like anonymous, unaccountable attack ads, stay tuned to YouTube. We are entering a new era of political campaigns because now, with the ease of YouTube, digital cameras and editing software, one person with a clever idea and some skill now has the power to affect an election.

Mainstream Media Inching Toward Embeddable Content

However slowly, the traditional media is beginning to make their content embeddable.

I noticed a few days ago MSNBC promoting that the videos on their site were now embeddable--they claim to be the first news network to make the move. Here's a segment on the Millennials' role in t his election cycle:

MSNBC uses the IFRAME tag set to embed the videos; not my preferred implementation, but you can't have everything.

Locally, only the Pioneer Press allows people to use their videos off-site. Here's a recent review by PiPress tech columnist Julio Ojeda-Zapata that demonstrates rather amusingly that the Ford Sync ain't quite multilingual:

The Star Tribune won't let you embed their video.

Twin Cities Public Television does not allow the videos on their site to be embedded and though they have uploaded their content to YouTube and Google Video, they have disabled the embedding feature. At Yahoo! Video, the TPT content is embeddable but it is old. Here is a segment featuring then-candidate Amy Klobuchar:

None of the local networks allow their video to be embedded.

However shuffling it is, I've got to count this as progress.

UPDATE: Add the New York Times to the list. Though you can't get embed code directly from the Times' video page, they've got a YouTube page through which they allow embedding:

Colts.com Internet Marketing

I've been meaning to write about this for a month but since the Super Bowl is today, I figured it's now or never.

Early last month a got a call from Dwight Adams, a reporter for the Indianapolis Star, who wanted my opinion for a story he was working on about the online marketing efforts of the Indianapolis Colts in particular and the NFL in general. He called me because of a two posts I did on the redesign of NFL.com.

When a reporter calls asking me to talk about my two favorite subjects--Internet marketing and football--I'm definitely game.

After taking a look at the Colts' online presence, it became quite clear quite quickly that the team is ahead of the curve compared to a lot of other teams' online marketing efforts.

That didn't really surprise me, though, because Indy's online presence is overseen by the Colts' Executive Director of Digital Business, Pat Coyle. I've been following Pat's excellent Sports Marketing 2.0 blog for a while now; it is the only blog that I know of that gives you a perspective of the Internet marketing issues being faced by professional sports franchise.

The Colt's maintain three web sites: The team's web site at Colts.com and the social networking sites MyColts.net and MyIndianaFootball.com. MyColts.net caters to the team's fans while MyIndianaFootball.com associates the Colts' brand with high school football. (There's even a team page for the high school I attended.)

The Colts are embracing social and embeddable media in a big way. The site features a podcast, a widget you can add to your blog or MySpace or Facebook page:

And embeddable video:

At MyColts.net, fans can discuss any and all things Colts on the site's forums or they can read Head Coach Tony Dungy's blog where he actually does post. Having your head coach maintain a blog is way ahead of the curve. Kudos for the Dungy and the Colts for having the courage and the insight to launch it.

The team does not appear to have a presence at the most popular social media sites like MySpace, Facebook, YouTube & Flickr. That absence, I suspect, has a lot to do with the NFL's attitude toward those sites than anything else: The league routinely asks YouTube, for example, to delete game highlights that users have uploaded.

Nevertheless, the Colt's online presence points the way toward those social networking sites. I'm betting that before too long, the Colts model and outposts at YouTube, Facebook, et. al. will be standard operating procedure.

Google Maps Knows All

A little geek humor. This is a cute, clever and funny short by The Vacationeers about the dangers of Google Street View:

The Evolution Of A Viral Video

In 2005, Sony ran a television ad campaign for their Bravia LCD television display that used bright colored superballs bouncing through the streets of San Francisco, filmed by director Nicolai Fuglsig, and set to José González's song Heartbeats. It is a sight to behold:

The incredible piece took on a life of it's own online and inspired mashups like this one that uses the Battlefield 2 video game:

And a take-off commercial for Tango Clear:

To, finally, a political protest by an Italian artist (don't artists pride themselves on their originality? Just asking.):

The End Of Nostalgia Marketing

  prince 
  Originally uploaded by A N G E L

If you've read my blog on a fairly regular basis, you know that I'm a music fan and, as a result, fascinated with music marketing. Music marketing is especially fascinating to me because, as Seth Godin points out in his Music Lessons post, since the music industry is falling apart, it provides a unique glimpse into the rise and innovation of online marketing and a demonstration of conversational marketing.

It began to dawn on me as I began following MP3 blogs that due to the phenomenal variety and volume of music that is now easily accessible through MySpace and MP3 blog aggregators like elbo.ws and Hype Machine, through music discovery services like last.fm and popular music blogs like stereogum, indiefeed and Aquarium Drunkard, the audience for bands and musicians is fragmenting radically. Music is no longer easily classified by genre.

This phenomenon has been discussed by New York Times columnist David Brooks and was recently a topic of conversation for Minnesota Public Radio's Midmorning program.

For the music fan in me, this fragmentation is fantastic because it means I have a vast array of new (for me) music to which, until now, I would never have had access.

But the marketer in me sees the death of nostalgia marketing. For whatever reason, music has a unique ability to trigger emotions. I have memories of listening to the hit songs of 70s rock bands through the crackly AM band on my dad's transistor radio. Songs from the 80s spark general memories of my college years.

It is because of this phenomenon that you see the nostalgia marketing of music compilation CDs from a given era through late night infomercials replete with your "hosts" saying remember when all the time. I couldn't find an actual example on YouTube, but this is a clever spoof of those infomercials that gets the idea across:

Specific songs recall specific events and that phenomenon will remain. But because the channels through which we hear music are now practically infinite--terrestrial-, Internet-, and HD-radio stations, television, YouTube, music blogs and podcasts, our phones and video games--the concept of a broadly popular music star is fading away.

The same dynamic will likely hold true for movies and television programming.

With no broadly popular music star or movie or television show, the common touchstone, the shared experience of liking the similar thing that makes nostalgia marketing work, is eliminated. Is, then, nostalgia marketing viable? I think not. At least not on a broad scale.

MacBook Air - Ultra-Cool Technology, Flawed Premise

Let me start by saying that I've never owned an Apple computer and I've never been an Apple guy but since the iPod, I've certainly been willing to consider becoming an Apple fanboy. I'm more also likely than most to champion a cool new computer, because I'm fascinated with technology.

So, fresh off the Macworld Expo, I gotta say I've blown away by the insanely thin MacBook Air. I mean, look at the thing!

What first-adopter worth the name could not lust after such a product?

Still, the premise behind the product is that people will want two computers. I don't buy it and wouldn't buy it for that very reason. As Computerworld's Scott Finnie points out:

From the specs, Apple's design decision was to target its new subnotebook at existing Mac users as a second computer for the road. But that's not what people want. They want one computer that can do all things. It's not what enterprises want, they want to buy only one computer per employee. And it's certainly not what home users want. Without the ability to easily expand when you're back at the ranch, the MacBook Air is an amazing prototype without a real market.

  macbook air 
  Originally uploaded by wingfish

But I would definitely use it if we had that Gdrive that I've been ranting about so I could use the MacBook Air as my computer processor, the technology with which I perform all my work, but access my data from a remote hard drive through broadband streaming. In that scenario, the lightweight sub-notebook that flash drives make possible would be ideal for me because I practically carry my computer wherever I go.

I don't think we're that far away from my ideal but there are still obstacles. Though, as Julio Ojeda-Zapata points out, Apple is pushing wireless access hard with this product but the reliability of Wi-Fi connections has thus far hardly been rock solid. He says, "I predict some problems since I have not found any Wi-Fi hookup to be as rock-solid reliable as Ethernet. I've lost count of the times I've plugged in at the office when a wireless connection went flaky."

But I'm perfectly willing and eager to make the jump when the stars align.

Macworld Expo From A Journalist's Point Of View

Pioneer Press technology columnist Julio Ojeda-Zapata has been all over the Macworld Expo and it's been fascinating to watch him microblog on Twitter, and in addition to his tech column for the PiPress, to post to his own Your Tech Weblog and upload video of the expo to YouTube. The video gives you a great sense of what it's like to be there:

What If God Had A MySpace?

Here's a very funny Friday video for you that ponders the profound question  (with a nod to