Three Minds On Digital Marketing @ Organic

I'm sitting on very flat surface here. Tiny rocks around my foot pads. The horizon is flat and looks perfect for digging!!! My robotic arm camera got some great shots around my feet. Is that ice right there?

I have recently been following a new friend on Twitter, the Mars Phoenix Lander. While I like to imagine a perky Twittering robot on the surface of Mars, something reminiscent of a Douglas Adams book, the actual voice behind the Mars Phoenix Lander is former CNN NASA correspondent Veronica McGregor. The Lander launched its twitter feed over Memorial Day weekend and has acquired over 15,000 Followers already, something the NASA team was not expecting.

"We got about 1000 new people in about an hour," McGregor said. "The funny part is that I had it set up to email me every time someone signed up. I went out to get lunch and my e-mail box had a thousand new e-mails when I came back. It sounded like a Vegas slot machine. My computer was just going ding ding ding." Wired.com

I am not surprised in the least by the large following. Twitter allows NASA fans to become updated more instantaneously than any other news service on the Lander's findings. Fans also get the chance to ask questions about the mission and engage with, if you let your imagination wander, an excited and informative robot on the surface of Mars.

Marta Strickland

I have been hesitating to write a Twitter primer, partly because there are plenty of good ones out there already (Zappos CEO, Twitter in Plain English), and partly because I'm worried it's already too late; the people I follow are complaining that the service has become too popular (and therefore is getting too slow) and are moving to Plurk. 

As early as April 2007, when we posted about Twitter as an example of lifestreaming, the earliest adopters were already grousing that is was over.  And yet as I was reminded at a roundtable of senior telco executives last week, it's a rare client that has seen the service in action before.  After I declared myself over Twitter in March, I followed your collective advice and re-engaged with the service. Here's what I've learned in the last couple of months:

1. Don't think of Twitter as just a mobile application

2. Use add-ons to extend Twitter's basic functionality

Twitter doesn't do a very good job of explaining the service or walking you through its functionality. Am I the only one who took a couple of weeks to figure out that you can message someone directly? Thankfully there are plenty of third party apps that make the service sing.  I use Hahlo on my iPhone and TwitterFox in-browser.  Twhirl and Twitterific are two other desktop widgets.

3. If you don't have friends who Tweet, use it follow your professional crushes

4. Prune your contacts periodically

The prevailing etiquette seems to be that if someone Follows you, it's polite to Follow them back.  You can rapidly find yourself with a hundreds of Friends that will need to be purged from time to time.  This is one area (not unlike an over-abundance of Facebook apps) where I haven't found any shortcuts. 

http://recentlyconsumed.com

Misha Cornes

It's one of those things that shouldn't really matter, but it does. Google changed their favicon, a 16 pixel by 16 pixel image that appears in various places on your browser (tabs, url field, bookmarks), and I just don't like it.

It makes me uncomfortable. As I look across my browser tabs, I see a face I don't recognize and it is distracting. My brain is having a really hard time equating a lowercase "g" with Google.

Much to my surprise, I'm not the only nitpicky one who noticed and disliked the new icon. In fact, many over at Mashable started to question the deeper meaning of the "rebranding":

"When I first saw the new favi in my tab bar I had to double check that I was actually on Google's homepage. The color is wrong, and putting it in lowercase is total sacrilege. It would be like if Yahoo! removed the exclamation point from their logo, and changed the font to comic sans." The Count Rob

"The old favicon did portray strength. When I saw this new one, the first thing that just popped into my head was stepping down." Deepa

"Google is not a small g. This is not a small change. This is a brand statement- without a clear rationale = mistake." Brian Carter

"I've been staring at the new favicon for some time now, wondering whether or not I'm on a phished site. Honestly, this favicon has nothing in common with Google." Lance

So much fuss over such a small space of the computer screen. Luckily, Google has stated that this is by no means the final icon and is challenging users to submit your Google favicon idea.

Marta Strickland

Clorox has taken an innovative experiential approach to promoting Green Works, a new line on plant-based household cleaning products. They hired Reverse Graffiti Artist Paul Curtis (aka Moose) to "paint' the inside of the Broadway Tunnel, which runs through Russian Hill into San Francisco's North Beach neighborhood. 

By removing the soot and grime from public spaces to create the outlines of nature, Moose makes a poignant statement about pollution in urban spaces and our reversal of the natural world. 

The video is a tiny bit heavy-handed in the product placement, but it still seems like a major departure for Clorox, which is not featured in connection with the project at all. 

It must have been a tough internal battle about whether or not to put the Clorox logo on the packaging (it's there in small format).  Because while Clorox=clean, bleach does not connote environmentally friendly (Burt's Bees, for example, doesn't carry the Clorox name).  Maybe the Clorox brand is there to counter the common skepticism that a green product "actually cleans".  Thanks to Laughing Squid.

Misha Cornes

Day: Tuesday, June 17
Weather: Crispy, with bursts of rain
Energy Levels: High (though Conor has a head cold from riding too much)
Mental State: Curious

Yesterday was the big registration day, with most of the attendants rolling into town. So today is the first day proper with all of the media, talks, seminars, kicking in. The awards part is in full swing as well -- they handed out awards last night for Direct and Promo. No idea how any of that went, though, as we have been holed up preparing for our workshop this afternoon. It will be about Camp Organic on the road; we're bringing it to the masses. Hopefully people who attend will take the idea of workshop as literally as we are: "work" = you will be expected to do something, and "shop" = come together as a group, not buy Chanel (very popular in these parts). We will be filming and posting, so keep on the lookout. We will report in tomorrow on how the workshop went, media and what we are seeing that is exciting. Let the games begin...

Conor Brady + Sam Cannon

 Weather: Bright
Energy Levels: Stable (Conor's better, now Sam has the sore throat)
Mental State: Read Only

We saw a couple of interesting seminars, including one put on by Leo Burnett and our pals at Contagious Magazine which paraded by a good number of campaigns that in some way explemplified what they called "Human Kind" advertising. Here to more of that kind of thinking...

Come to think of it, that may have been yesterday...these days seem to blur together at this point in the week, thanks in part to a nightly ritual called "the gutter bar." By day it's an unassuming bistro next to the Hotel Martinez; by night 72 La Croisette transforms into a sea of drunken (or hopped up on very expensive Coca-Cola Light) advertising fools. As the bar technically accommodates about 50-75 people, the gutter -- and street, alleyway, median, and the Martinez driveway -- is the only place for its hundreds of patrons to go. And there you have it: agency CEOs, ad students, film producers, digital divas, creative directors, and media sales people literally rubbing shoulders with each other into the morning hours. Even when that evenings' parties disappoint or that one friend keeps flaking on you, there's always the gutter bar.

Conor Brady + Sam Cannon

Animoto is in beta but it's very very cool..  Essentially you upload a bunch of static images, choose a song of your choice (or upload your own) and Animoto produces a video based on what you've uploaded..  The images have some very nice motion effects and is all synced very nicely with the soundtrack you selected or uploaded...

I read about this site from one of my newsletter subscriptions and so I took 5 minutes and played with it.  Very easy to use. My only negative is the wait time while it puts your video together for you - but i'ts hardly a valid complaint as it's worth the wait.  The site allows you to watch videos/movie trailers while your waiting for your final result..    With that said - I'll definitely be back.

I only created a small (< 30 secs) version but you have the option to create full length video's as well.

My first animoto can be found here. 

Enjoy!

Patrick Dunphy

p.s.  Pardon the cheesiness..  Yours truly is getting married this summer.  ;)

I can't say that I am avid reader of Vanity Fair or many of the blogs they track but I thought this was a clever piece of visual design 

http://www.vfdaily.com/culture/2008/blogopticon/index.html

I am a sucker for a quadrant chart and this one combines categorization, mapping based on content type, attitude AND navigation to the actual blog. It also told me something about my own tastes - I tend to like earnest opinion-oriented blogs and have little time for the scurrilous. That would officially make me boring to invite any party!

Adam Turinas

Google Trends has been all over the blogs recently. They recently launched Google Trends for Websites, a service which has been getting some slack from bloggers. The argument goes that they aren't really providing useful enough data for smaller websites and blogs, which would be a big portion of the interested audience. Then, of course, the upcoming election has people wondering how accurate of a predictive tool Google Trends could be. It's certainly more representative of mass opinion than sites such as Politweets, which because of their bias towards early tech adopters swayed heavily towards Ron Paul in the early primary process.

But, the most interesting story about Google Trends that I have read recently was a piece in the New York Times about Google Trends being used in a pornography trial in Florida. The argument goes something like this:

"In a novel approach, the defense in an obscenity trial in Florida plans to use publicly accessible Google search data to try to persuade jurors that their neighbors have broader interests than they might have thought.

"In the trial of a pornographic Web site operator, the defense plans to show that residents of Pensacola are more likely to use Google to search for terms like 'orgy' than for 'apple pie' or 'watermelon.' The publicly accessible data is vague in that it does not specify how many people are searching for the terms, just their relative popularity over time. But the defense lawyer, Lawrence Walters, is arguing that the evidence is sufficient to demonstrate that interest in the sexual subjects exceeds that of more mainstream topics -- and that by extension, the sexual material distributed by his client is not outside the norm . . .

"The search data he is using is available through a service called Google Trends. It allows users to compare search trends in a given area, showing, for instance, that residents of Pensacola are more likely to search for sexual terms than some more wholesome ones."

The article then goes on to prove that when matched search for search against words like "surfing" and "Nintendo", however, the defense's argument completely backfires. I can't even think of a scenario that I would commonly search for the term "watermelon" on the internet, unless I was looking for an online retailer to sell me seeds for a garden. Still, it's an interesting argument.

Obscenity trials in the past have used items such as pornographic magazines and videos available at local stores as a judge for what the community considers decent versus indecent. In modern trials, defense attorneys have been trying to make the move to the availability of web content, and now to search behavior. So far, it hasn't worked to their advantage, but as more and more detailed analytic tools become available, it will be interesting to see if that changes.

Sure, in this recent case about "apple pie" versus "orgy", the connection to actual human behavior and intent is somewhat laughable... but just think about it. Once you start adding social graphs and common language search into the equation, couldn't search behavior patterns and trends start to be a lot more connected to the actual values and interests of a "community"? We even have FriendFeed and their micromeme suggesting a sort of Google Trends for groups of friends.

Just another example of power to put in the "scary Google" category. Thanks to Bridget McKinley for sharing this article with me.

Marta Strickland