The Vernacularist

Ideas for Media Conference Please

If I wasn't busy enough, now I also have to help organize the MBA Media and Entertainment Conference, which is managed by MBA students at Stern, Columbia, Upenn, Duke and MIT.  (I know the website is out of date...we are on it. )  I'm revved for it.  Feb 9, 2007 at Columbia University.  It switches between Columbia and NYU every year.

This is what I need from you.  I have the opportunity to organize a panel on anything that falls within these categories...so it's a lot.  Of course, I'm already thinking of inviting executives from new media companies and interactive companies, but what else should I be thinking of?  What would you want to know more about?  I would really appreciate some suggestions from my very fun and creative friends who are paying attention to all this stuff. Don't forget that this is a conference for MBAs, so finance, mergers & acquisitions, and all that glorious business stuff is muy importante too. 

Here are some topics and companies I've been toying with:

Mobile technologies - entertainment companies are dipping their toes in the water, but no one has experimented enough to know what works.  What will it take?  Invite marketing execs who have tried campaigns.

Snakes on a Plane: what went right and what went terribly wrong...lessons learned. Invite the creative team and studio.  I realize this is a long shot, but there are other ways to explore this topic too.

How to make money off of mashups (beyond music)? Invite who??

Help me out, peeps....

My blog as a graph

This graph shows my blog social network. I made this graph at this website. The site randomly generates the color patter, so it's not going to look like the graph below again.  I really like this color pattern, though.  The graph is certainly a much prettier way of showing your online blog network.

Brawling over Ring Tones

(Cross-posted at EchoDitto)

I've been spending some significant time making ring tones for clients over the last two weeks. We've seen this ring tone wave coming for a while now given that 23% of American mobile phone owners (30 million Americans) downloaded a ring tone between August 2004 and 2005. Internationally, mobile phones will soon outpace computers as the dominant way to access the internet, so customizing a ring tone will soon be common.

Don't just take my word for it. Seth Godin, famous author and top blogger of strategic marketing, thinks ring tones are going to explode:

Take a look at virtually every giant online success (except for Amazon) and none of them were obvious in 1992. I think we're going to discover a whole new universe of cell phone services that people want to pay for, things that we won't be able to live without. Like... ringtones.

Last summer, Fillipino President Gloria Arroyo was hounded by a ring tone made from a recording of her phone conversation with an elections official. Critics allege the conversation demonstrates her electioneering violations. But how many Fillipinos really used the ring tone? All we know is that it's been downloaded over 1 million times, making it the most popular ring tone ever.

Since then, we've seen ring tones used for political and advocacy campaigns in Israel, and the U.S. Our friend Eric Gundersen at Development Seed made a ring tone of Pres. Bush's infamous "Heck of a job, Brownie" comment regarding the former FEMA administrator's performance during the hurrican Katrina disaster. What if 20 phones with that ring tone went off during a congressional hearing of the post-Katrina response?

Even recently in Iraq, a lawmaker's ring tone, sounding a Shiite religious chant, incited a scuffle and led to a shutdown of the legislature. There is enormous potential for the disruptive effects of ring tones to revolutionize advocacy campaiging.

For many people around the world, there are only three things they carry everywhere they go: wallet, keys, mobile phone. As mobile phones become true personal, mobile pocket computers, we'll see tremendous advances in mobile phones role in advocacy. Not only can you download ring tone from the internet, but friends and family can send them to each other via SMS and MMS.

What could a ring tone campaign look like in the real world?

• "Mobile Stand" - Rather than simply organizing a rally, march or sit-in, organizers can also plan for the supporters around the world, no matter their location, to have their mobile phones ring a prepared ring tone at a set time. The ring tone could be a symbolic song or statement from a pivotal leader calling for change.
• "Ring-raisers": Sell ring tones to fundraise for specific nonprofit campaigns. Create a ring tone for each campaign and restrict the revenue for each ring tone to the affiliated campaign. For example, revenue from a ring tone of recorded whale call would only help the current Stop the Whaling campaign.
• "Ring-Alerts": Download a ring tone that will ring only at a set time. For example, an exclusive message from a candidate to wake you up on election day. Or a message from a candidate to remind you to join volunteers to knock on doors and drop literature at homes in your district. How about a message from a celebrity to remind you to see a movie on opening day?

This sample of possibilities only touches the surface we can see. There are enormous opportunities for ring tones to become the best advocacy or direct marketing tactic nonprofits, political campaigns and businesses have ever seen.

Here is a scary thought for those of you who think you can pick up this wave next year or later: organizations might never be able to buy mobile phone numbers -- like you can buy email addresses or landline phone numbers. (Big ups to John Aravosis at AMERICAblog for drawing attention to how easy it is to buy cell phone records.) Hence, the sooner you start to collect mobile phone numbers, the better. Otherwise, you are just playing catch up.

Save this number: 202 299 7949

My friend and colleague, Tom Lee, has just unleashed a great mobile phone-based search service called Last Call.  In his spare time, Tom is the director of technology for DCist, the most popular blog about all things Washington, DC. So it's no surprise that he took on this challenge, and now, after some laborious nights, gives birth to the greatest thing to hit DC since baseball came back. 

The service offers all the information you need to figure out your night on the town:  Metro schedules, OpenTable reservations, concert listings, movie showtimes and SMS weather report.

All you have to do is text the number 202 299 7949 with some easy to remember nomenclature and you are all set.  If you forget the words to use, just text HELP to this number and it'll send you the cheat sheet. Save the number. Test it while you are out. And let Tom know if there are any errors.

Mobile Buddhists

Saw this great Picture of the Day at the MobileActive blog. Ya think mobile phones are taking over the world?  I'd pull the pic into my blog, but looks like there is some copyright issues.

A home for jokesters, JibJab style

(cross-posted at EchoDitto)

Today, JibJab launched a joke-sharing online social network called JokeBox.  JibJab founders Evan and Gregg Spiridellis were inspired by their father, a frequent email jokster, to create this hub for storing and sharing jokes of any media persuasion. The site has been in private beta-testing for three months, during which time roughly 40,000 registered members have contributed 25,000 written jokes, photos, audio and video files.

The Spiridellis brothers readily admit they see JokeBox as a necessary secondary revenue stream for JibJab Media, their animation studio famous for the "This Land" short, which has been downloaded over 65 million times.  They run their shop pretty lean, with only 7 staff, so there are long lags between projects.  In fact, Jokebox.com redirects to JibJab.com, so JokeBox is the online face for JibJab Media.

Beyond savings and sharing content, JokeBox lets you send messages within the network, establish friends, and create message groups called "fan clubs." Much like YouTube , the video sharing site du jour, you can browse the content by "Top Rated Jokes" or "Most Viewed Jokes," which make the content much more accessible in the 10 seconds you have to grab a user's attention. Basically, they have covered the online social networking fundamentals.  After playing a round a little, I don't see any new functionality.

BudLight has banner throughout the site and either a mantle or skyscraper placement within the site,.  Other advertisers including Benadryl and the Suburban Auto Group Ford/Chevy car dealership also have placements in the JibJab video shorts, which are prominently featured within the site.

If you click on any of the ads, you get to download any of the current "Real Men of Genius" television or radio ads, which feature the character Ted Ferguson competing in a competitions like "going shopping with your girlfriend." Once you click on the link, you have to re-enter your birthdate, even if you are signed in.  That's a little annoying and will certainly reduce conversion rates, but you can't mess with those legal requirements. 

The value proposition for a JokeBox member is that he or she can more easily find, store and share funny content with their friends rather than trying to manage it with folders in their inboxes. This network gives these humor hobbyists a vehicle to become their own media channel, similar to YouTube. 

JibJab certainly has couple strengths that make JokeBox less risky:

• it has the name recognition to grab significant earned media attention without have to buy online ads;
• with already 645,000 enthusiasts, split evenly across gender, subscribed to their newsletter, there is enough of a passionate base that will take the time to try site; and
• it is an underdog company, like Apple or Mozilla, that will appeal to the technophiles, who can give a site life after launch.

It remains to be seen if JokeBox can separate itself from YouTube enough to provide a unique value or it just becomes a re-posting of hits from YouTube.  Also, do humor hobbyists have enough of an affinity with each other to turn JokeBox into an online humor hotspot?  Will they seek each other out online and make this site competitive -- like antiquing or finding a great shirt at a thrift store?

How to Create Passionate Users?

(This is cross-posted on EchoDitto's blog)

I too went to the South by Southwest interactive conference this past week in Austin, Texas.  The panel discussions covered a healthy range of topics that could fall under blogging, mobile content and distribution, web 2.0 applications, web design and entrepreneurship for web 2.0 ideas. 

I enjoyed almost all the panels I attended.  Unfortunately, some of the presenters were more interested in hyping their own sites rather than educating the audience.  I know, it goes with the territory since most bloggers and entrepreneurs need all the attention they can get just to make ends meet. I can tolerate some buzzing, but the "How To Add Video To Your Blog panel" was a whole lot o' grandstanding and not a lot of best practices.

The most impressive presentation was Kathy Sierra's hour conversation about How to Create Passionate Users.  Although she presented by herself, her style was so casual and unguarded that it felt we were in a small room together rather than 500+ attendees packed in large meeting  room.

Her explanations were very clear and her presentation was interactive -- she made the audience form small groups and discuss each question -- which added to the conversational tone. Kathy organized her presentation as a series of questions, sort of like a survey you could use for evaluating your own work:

• How do you help your users kick ass?

  You have to help your users be the best at what ever you need them to do in order to buy your product or service.  For example, Nikon created NikonNet, a photography training site, to help their consumers kick ass at photography.  Sure, Nikon wants professionals to use their cameras, but obviously it's more important to their business that they encourage amateur photographers like you and me.  Users care about what you DO with a product or service, not what that product is by itself. 

  Even more interesting, you will subconsciously relate your pleasurable experience on the site with an actual Nikon camera, since Nikon is adding to your happiness.  Kathy called this the "misattribution of arousal" because your brain instinctively pairs a pleasurable experience with whatever happens to be around -- in this case the Nikon brand.  The success of celebrity partnerships with advocacy campaigns also exemplifies this trend.  Bono helps you kick ass at a U2 concert, so when he talks about The ONE Campaign during the show, you are in a perfect emotional state to get excited about the campaign.

   

• How to get past the brain's crap filter?

  You better excite the brain or else you won't have a chance at attracting passion from users.  You best be talkin' to the brain because you'll have to work much harder to convince a user that your product or service deserves their passion.  What works?  Here is a short list:

  weird stuff, novel, something that stands out

  scary things (even image of people seeing scary things)

  sexy

  babies, children, cute

  funny

  faces, especially if they have a strong reaction

  images that are unresolved

  For example, why would anyone snowboard twice?  It's painful. Your butt hurts for days. And you will certainly embarrass yourself in front of everyone on the ski mountain. You do it because it looks cool.
• What do you communicate to users?

A conversational style always beats a formal style because, as Kathy pointed out, the brain's retention of material with "you" is much better. The brain interprets content with "you" as a conversation and, therefore, gives the material more weight. My experience with building interactive campaigns certainly supports this. Some of the clearest examples come from email marketing guides.

• How are you building the challenge?

You need to give users bite-sized chucks to digest and tackle rather than asking them to do everything all at once.  That's why the best video games have levels or chapters that get incrementally harder. However, recognition of the users skill level is just as important, and often undervalued, as an aspect of creating passionate users.  Anyone familiar with martial arts knows that color coded belts are an essential piece of the social language within martial arts communities. It's how community members recognize skill and authority.

If you are successful at creating passionate users, your community will become so dependent that it acts more like a tribe or cult, wearing your t-shirts and sporting your bumper-stickers everywhere. Any technophile will tell you that the Apple community is about as cultish as you can get without having a "______-phobia" associated with the behavior. 

 

• How do you get your users in flow or in the zone?

Michael Jordan, Tiger Woods and Lance Armstrong might be the best examples of athletes who know how to play "in the zone" or "in flow," loosely defined as "being in your optimal experience."  If you satisfy the previous questions above, you will lead your users into "flow" and create a passionate user. As someone who plays sports and music, I know what that semi-euphoric, semi-numb experience feels like.  I'm going to keep that as a guide post by which to measure the strategies I recommend to my clients.

Kathy has a great blog that follows this topic too.  I'll leave you the same way Kathy left us:

It doesn't matter what they think about you. It's about how they fell about themselves as a result of interacting with you.  How are you going to give them an "I Rule" experience?"

SxSW Convergence and Advertising

Forrester: Growing backlash against advertising and increasing influence of the internet on purchase decisions.

Powered: Educational Marketing

• helps qualify users, educate users and then serves the correct content and merchandize the "calls to action" at the right time.
• the consumer and marketer win: consumer learns and gets smarter about hwat they are about to buy.  the marketer gets to provide the product at value level. 55:1 ROI for educational marketing.
• advertise to them in a way that they will value

WildTangent: Online Game Development

• following the cable tv model.  Take content from anywhere and put it into their distribution network with thier partners.
• Fate: roll playing game open to all.
• around game ads, in game ads and product placement, promotions, game launch or game load

FilmLoop: photo casting platform for bringing photos directly to users, direct two way channel that is always on. Sharing, broadcasting, and push content.  250,000 registered users, click thru 1.4%

• Ads get interspersed with photo loops.
• you can tag photo loops
• can target demos and content keywords
• Scion, TBS (Sex in the City), Purina, use ads as actual content
• Ebay is putting up the photos of auction items

Bazaarvoice: researches consumer content about your product.

Content + Reviews + Referrals (WOM) + Community + Platforms (time shifting)

Web 2.0

• Participative
• Remixable
• Collective conscious
• Scalable

Opel Devine's

After mobile food

At the mobile happy hour. fun music space sponsored by red bull