Three Minds On Digital Marketing @ Organic

Turning Baseball Into "Personalized We" Experience

mstrickl — 2008-11-19T10:32:19-08:00

I'm not an avid baseball fan but I do enjoy partaking in my boyfriend's Yankee season tickets a few times a year. Recently, an announcement on the NY Post about changes to Yankee stadium caught my attention:

"Instant replays and a variety of camera angles will soon be accessible via cellphone, and fans may even be able to dial up hot dogs and beer, team officials announced yesterday." NY Post

I'm a little bit torn. On one hand, it seems that it will take away from the classic "experience" of the game. There's something about baseball that makes you think of a father/son enjoying some bonding time, hot dogs and waving giant foam fingers. But on the other hand, the experience is already so far from that with $10 beers, overweight men with the team's name spelled out on their stomachs and homerun balls selling for hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Sporting events, especially baseball games (perhaps because of the America's Pastime references), feel like large social gatherings. Thousands of people coming together to share the experience of rooting for their team. There's a collective feeling of "we". This technology makes it more about the "me". People will spend more time staring at their phones and seatbacks instead of high-fiving the strangers around them after a stellar play.

I'd like to see them take this technology even further. Interactive games that folks can play against one another on the large stadium screens, creating/voting on songs/playlists, posting photos they take at the stadium for all to see... make it a "Personalized We" experience.

Tracy Richards

Don't Chat With Your Mouth Full

mstrickl — 2008-11-19T05:08:54-08:00

Growing up, most of us could rely on an overbearing parent to point out when we needed to mind our manners. Dear ol' mom or dad could always call us out for interrupting someone, or opening our mouths full of mac n' cheese, or for forgetting to send Aunt Dolores a thank you note for the bedazzled sweater.

Later in life, even if our parents happened to be etiquette-challenged, there were sources - like Miss Manners or the Emily Post Institute - available for a crash course in protocol, say, before an important job interview lunch:

- Water glass to the right directly above the knife. Check.
- Napkin folded in lap. Check.
- Restrain self from ordering clam linguine. Check.

Despite many resources to rely on for real-world etiquette, I've found myself in need of an expert to turn to for manners in the web's social network setting. (And clearly, my parents can't help in this situation.)

Some topics I've been contemplating are:

- Is it rude (or plagiarizing) when I like something that someone else has posted - to post it on my own Facebook wall? Do I give credit to the original poster?

- Just how well should I know someone before asking them to be a friend on Facebook or LinkedIn? And, in reverse, when is it acceptable to snub someone else's friendship offer?

- When is an e-mail on Facebook best kept private as a message and when should you post on a person's wall? (Or, to be more direct, how do I gently ask my mother-in-law not to posts comments on my Facebook wall asking about "her baby boy"?)

Besides myself, I know others in need of some education about social networking. At a recent girlfriend outing, one friend expressed her extreme frustration with another for SHOUTING at her in emails (by using ALL CAPS). Clearly, the recipient of the feedback was a little shell-shocked by the ambush. But, lesson learned.

In my search for etiquette answers, I was hard pressed to find an Emily Post-like expert (despite 653,000 Google results). Though, I did uncover a new term (well, new to me anyway): "Netiquette". Unfortunately, this Wikipedia posting really only has a few email examples of etiquette.

Sadly, in my search, I never was able to find a Netiquette bible out there. Even on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter's own websites, there are plenty of FAQ, how-to and safety facts available, but really little material covering etiquette. There were, however, a few random places I got good tidbits of info, some of which even answered my own personal questions:

- Wired Magazine "How to save Face on Facebook"
- CIO.com "Social Networking: Etiquette Tips for the Masses"
- The Times "Etiquette pitfalls in the social web of wannabe friends"

Combining all of these virtual social rules together might be a great blog opportunity for someone up to the task. Emily Post's great-great granddaughter, Anna Post - are you reading this? (I'd friend her on LinkedIn, but that'd just be rude.)

Traci Armstrong

Execution Is Key To Creating Exceptional Experiences

mstrickl — 2008-11-17T08:50:07-08:00

A little while ago, an ad for the new Wario game for Nintendo Wii caught our eye. It was given a ton of praise for it's originality and the way it really caught the viewer's eye, getting them very interested in the product which it was advertising.

I ran across a similar ad today on the IGN site - at least, it's trying to be similar.

Once it loads, you'll see the Tomb Raider Underworld ad on the top and right banners, with a "Pull down The Ring" callout in the top right-hand corner. This is Problem #1 with the ad - you can't actually pull the ring at all. You have to CLICK on the ring, without dragging at all, in order to get the desired effect. It's a very, very cool concept. The problem here is that the concept has been pretty badly executed.

Problem #1 - user confusion. You don't tell the user to "pull" on something with your mouse when the functionality isn't there for that to happen.

Problem #2 - load time. The ad loaded in between 23 and 25 seconds consistently, whereas the Youtube Nintendo ad started playing in less than 6.5 seconds. Granted, IGN is a notoriously slow site.

Problem #3 - problematic presentation. The ad loads in two pieces, at completely separate load times. You're left with this "Pull Down The Ring" message with nothing else to support it at all until the final piece loads.

Problem #4 - mediocre video. The video itself is very well done, but the amount of time it takes you to get to it, plus the overall choppy quality of it, takes away significantly from the video's impact.

The bottom line is there are some lessons to be learned here about how the impact of a really cool ad concept can be drastically reduced because of less-than-stellar execution - something we should all keep in mind.

Daryl Brewer

A Decentralized, Distributed Social Web

mstrickl — 2008-11-17T05:03:13-08:00

With movements like Data Portability, the social web is moving to a more open platform. The big networks are joining or building service offerings to take content, user data, social graphs, and technology out to the wider web. Facebook has Connect, MySpace and Ning are part of OpenSocial, and smaller players like Twitter and Friendfeed were built on an open platform from the start.

The walls of the garden are breaking down, and it begs the question: What will this new social world look like? Where will we be socializing in the future and how?

We are seeing the start of this next generation social web with the emergence of social browsing applications. These projects range from browser extensions like Headup and Glue to actual full-on browser offerings like Flock. These tools help bring social conversation and content directly into the browsing experience. While each offers its unique flavor, not all of these start-ups will survive.

The ultimate winner will be the one that follows these two rules:
- reduce, don't create, social noise and
- leverage existing social data and connections

1. Reduce, don't create, social noise
The social experience can be a little overwhelming... all those tweets and pokes and flair buttons. The browsing experience should be more guided, about finding useful information. The biggest danger of a "social browsing" application is contributing to the noise rather than giving you relevant chatter in context.

Reframe It allows users to comment on any element of any page. It creates a contextual discussion around content. It could get really noisy, but there are filters. Still, it's a lot of work to joining the right groups and follow the right people. And every comment you make is tied to a URL, rather than the specific movie or event you commented on.

Headup leverages your current circle of friends. If you are browsing a site and there is text about a band or a person, a plus sign will appear to indicate social content. Headup tells you what friends liked/disliked this artist and whether there are events in your area. It's less noise and more about relevant social information.

Glue limiting social alerts to sites around specific verticals: wine, books, movies, television, music, etc. The idea is to bring back the conversation to the context where it would have the most value. It's at Amazon.com or Wine.com that you really want to rate, comment, or see what your friends thought. And the social data is tied to the actual object, not the page. So even if you are browsing a movie on Fandango, you will see how your friend rated it on Flixster.

2. Leverage existing social data and connections
Don't make me join another network. Don't make me reconnect with my friends, upload my photos again, or rate my favorite movies... again!!

Socialbrowse makes link sharing a more social behavior. You can browse pages and visually see the links your friends thought were interesting and why. It's simple and ingenious, only I already have platforms where I'm doing that. Facebook, Twitter, Friendfeed, Delicious. Why do I need to follow people on Socialbrowse if I am already following them on Twitter? Why do I have to share again if I've already tagged it on delicious?

This is where the Flock Browser gets things really right. While it lacks the contextual page mark-up (maybe version 3.0?), it pulls in data from all your existing social networks. It connects you to all your friends, no matter where they are, and brings their lifestreams together. And best of all, it allows you to push the content you are viewing out to your social networks in an easy and efficient way.

In the end, the one thing that all the extensions and applications don't offer is that immersive feeling of being part of the mass conversation. They offer no way to find people on the network and soak in the patchwork of imagery and data bits that is their online social life. For that we still need the social network portal, the centralized and connected social web. But for everything else, I think we are going to see a lot less noisy and a lot more useful social web.

Marta Strickland

ThreeMinds Weekly Digest 11.14.08

mstrickl — 2008-11-14T07:06:16-08:00

It's that sad time of year here in the northern states. The inevitable cold. Sure, it will be fun for a while to bundle up in winter clothes, hot chocolate, fireplace, and the holiday season. But come January, the novelty has worn off and there is still three months to go.

Leave it to Google to turn their trends technology to mapping the flu season. While technology might not be able to bring sunshine to Michigan, at least it might make us smarter about not getting sick.

What's Been Happening This Week?

The Battle To Monetize
YouTube made two great leaps this week in the realm of monetization. First, they announced an AdSense-style model that allows video creators to bid on sponsored placement and search terms. Second announcement, which came yesterday, they are placing ads inside of video embeds. The ads are small and can be clicked on to disappear. I imagine there will still be a cry of annoyance from the YouTube fan base, but nothing as drastic as what might happen over at Facebook...

Facebook's monetization strategy and marketing techniques have been under far more scrutiny. A suggestion that marketer's use photo tagging to promote their message sent the bloggers and tweeters into a frenzy. Then, the Wall Street Journal threw some doubt on the launch of Facebook "engagement ads", ads that try and appear more like social applications. While marketers scratch their heads and users resist, I do think that there is some value to be had with the engagement ads. They just need to be in line with the spirit of the platform, like Ben & Jerry's managed to do during the election with it's free ice cream campaign.

The Tweet Cup Floweth
Twitter hit 1 billion tweets this week!!! That is 1000000000 140 character nuggets of link shares, nonsense, and occasional insight. The bird chatter is becoming hard to handle, but luckily people like Chris Brogan have let out their secrets of how to deal with Twitter at full volume. One little bird that has gone silent though is the MarsPhoenix, which has likely been wiped out in a Martian dust storm, one of the coolest ways to quit Twitter.

Meanwhile, there was drama this week over an app called Twitterrank. Hundreds of Twitter users handed over their usernames and passwords out of curiosity, crowd "wisdom", and vanity. Luckily it turns out the app creator's intentions were not for evil... this time.

Marta Strickland

Ocarina, The Next Rock Band Killer?

mstrickl — 2008-11-13T05:10:16-08:00

First, Smule took the app world by storm with their simple but ingenious Sonic Lighter, that allowed you to see where other people around the globe had their flames burning bright at the same time as you. Next, they launched a special campaign edition where people could burn their lighters blue or red in support of the presidential candidates.

Now, Smule is bringing the official instrument of the Legend of Zelda, the Ocarina to the iPhone.

Why this is cool:
1. It's a digital representation of an ancient (12,000yrs old) analog instrument.
2. Its more than pressing buttons, there's a human element as blowing into the microphone impact the performance.
3. You can connect with people globally. You have the option of sharing what you're performing, or listening to someone half way around the globe.
4. It distills the core of what makes Rock Band and Guitar Hero so wildly successful and puts it into the palm of your hand while allowing you the freedom to create.

Maybe not a Rock Band killer, but undeniably awesome.

Stephen Murray

Welcome to the Future NOW

David Feldt — 2008-11-12T08:09:05-08:00

Sprint has a really interesting new site to promote it's mobile broadband offering. It's called "Sprint NOW" and it is a futuristic personal information / news dashboard made of a screen full of cool visual widgets giving you a snapshot of our World now.

There's a broad range of widgets showing, for example, the current National Debt, email sent , forests cut down, energy usage across the globe, new cases of malaria, today's top Google searches and Youtube videos.

When I first saw it, I imagined this being projected up on a huge digital display in my home similar to a scene from "The Island", "Minority Report" or "Ironman". I imagine myself going up to the display and customizing the data simply using my hands.

There's no hard sell from Sprint - just that soothing synthetic female voice telling you the current time, a stunning glimpse of how diverse and interesting our world is and how this diverse information can be presented in real-time NOW.

Kudos to our friends at Goodby, Silverstein!

David Feldt

User Experience Design Is About Creating Good Theatre

mstrickl — 2008-11-12T05:13:23-08:00

One of the most common definitions of Information Architecture is that it's the "structural design of shared information environments." It defines information structures to answer the question "how does a user find the information they want?"

Today, the Web is certainly not just a hypertext system of pages and pages of information linked to each other, but a complex software interface for online social interactions, interactive animations, processes, applications and much more. While most Web IAs still call themselves Information Architects, and while IA is still an important part of what they do, it's really only a part of it. Some IA professionals now specialize in social media, some in interaction/experience design.

Creating exceptional experiences online, and developing efficient interactive marketing, is much about storytelling. We develop stories that excite and motivate people, and platforms where people can come create and edit their own stories. Interactive storytelling is in many ways more complex than traditional movies or theatre, but IAs can still learn a lot from scriptwriting techniques.

Chicago-based theatre producer Greg Allen's "25 Rules for Creating Good Theatre" make a good, basic guide to designing customer experience, services, and presentation technique as well. Some are basic rules that we all know and recognize, like these for example:

Rule #4: Know why you are creating this show.
Rule #5: Make form fit function.
Rule #15: Include a surprise.

Some others are more thought-provoking ideas. Try applying these to social media:
Rule #22: Get non-verbal.
Rule #23: Establish ritual through repetition.

Check out Greg's full list here: http://tinyurl.com/28mbqq

Karri Ojanen

Bringing The World Up To 2.0

mstrickl — 2008-11-11T05:19:37-08:00

From the title alone, one would have expected the recent Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco to have dealt primarily with the "usual": advertising, user-generated content, social media, and consumer trends. But this conference was a lot less about where the web meets marketing, and instead focused on where web meets world.

The final speaker of the night on Friday, Al Gore, summed it up nicely when he compared the history of the web to the history of electricity. When electricity was first tapped, there was a lot of focus on whizzbang gadgets, and now electricity flows everywhere, empowering our daily lives. It's time to look at redesigning our systems to be powered by the web. It's time to look at redesigning "the context in which these online activities take place -- in other words, World 2.0." (Gore)

For some industries presenting at the Web 2.0 Summit, the change is already occurring: politics, health, defense, green energy, and disaster aid. But there were others pleading with the audience, hoping to get the ears of venture capitalists and developers, in need of a 2.0 revolution. Those pleas namely came from Michael Pollan for a Food 2.0 movement, and Al Gore who wanted to see cloud computing and collective intelligence be put to work against the climate crisis.

THE PRESENT

For Health 2.0, there are companies like 23andme.com that are putting valuable genetic information in the hands of consumers, enabling more transparent communication between the patient and the doctor. The health panel felt that open data could solve one of health care's biggest problems, getting patients through the door. Basic tools could use genetic data and personal devices to help with preventative continued care, giving updates on your health to your doctor.

For Defense 2.0, we were presented with an interesting question. How smart is it for our defense system to become dependent on this technology? Collaboration technology like the Command Post of the Future and the Warfighter's forum are currently being used by the US army. They enable shared tactical maneuvers, instantaneous communication across countries, and consistency in information viewing. And at the same time, for the huge tech advancement, it also produces new vulnerability to spam and cyber-warfare.

For Green Energy 2.0, there were two interesting start-ups that made it into the presentations. One was Wattzon, a site that helps you measure all the energy use in your life by converting everything into watts. The site uses crowd wisdom to develop more accuracy and helps you understand the size solar panel or oil barrel you'd need to power your life. Another start-up was Sungevity that uses a combination of Google Maps and sun measurement to give accurate and fast solar-power savings estimates to consumers.

THE FUTURE

Michael Pollan, author of the Omnivore's Dilemma, made a great case for Food 2.0, and the need for a Farmer-In-Chief, the subject made famous by a letter he wrote for the NY Times. How do we use social technology to better inform eaters? Pollan called for more food system transparency, knowing where your food comes from while you are in the store, just like a nutrition label. Another idea was to create online communities that would help bring local communities together around food.

In a world constantly looking for the "next thing", maybe we shouldn't be talking about Web 3.0. Maybe 2009 will be the year of World 2.0, or as this interesting post put it recently, Web H2.0:

"Web 2.0, contrary to the thought of a few, is not dead. Hope-driven web 2.0 ("Web H2.0" for short, and pronounced "web H-two-oh) has gained a lot of recognition lately. And that's the next wave of web 2.0 products we'll see. A shift towards hope."

Marta Strickland

Social Media Itching To Go Geomobile

mstrickl — 2008-11-10T06:35:22-08:00

Editor's Note: ThreeMinds and Organic welcomes Karri Ojanen, seasoned blogger and information architect to the team.

Much of the Internet, as we know it now, is still top-down, highly virtualized, and not truly mobile. Most of the updates people post come from the comfort of their chair at the laptop, but, in social media, the use of mobile devices is increasing. Some also tout location-aware services as one of the next big opportunities for online marketers.

For the user, the increasingly popular microblogging services are competing to get to everyone's phones from their laptops. Twitter, Jaiku, Facebook and others all offer mobile apps, either third-party or their own, for posting tweets and status updates on the go, but they don't connect the updates with location-based data. Adding location data to the services could offer new opportunity to marketers, who could start offering location-based information to people on the move. And it could help make the connections that people create online more real, when 'current location' is added to the details.

None of these ideas are really new as concepts, but only now the required technology is becoming common enough to spring up some services. The iPhone 3G and other GPS-equipped devices are becoming more popular, and even without GPS the user's current location can be estimated by using the GSM network cell ID or the WiFi network that the user's on.

To that market, there's GyPSii...

Available for BlackBerries, the iPhone, Symbian S60, and Windows Mobile devices, it allows users to create points of interest and associate images, video, audio and text, reference the POI to the user's location and categorize, tag and describe the POI and submit it to the server. It also lets the user to search for family and friends using geo-locations and look for third-party points of interest, like more info on nearby businesses and services. GyPSii comes in several languages, and got a lot of attention from everybody from bloggers to the CNN when it was launched at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona earlier this year. As interesting as it is, it might be a while until GyPSii really kicks off. It only works with GPS-equipped devices, and, with the current cellular battery technology, the use of GPS is a drain on power.

But Nokia's got two other, similar but simpler services for those worried about battery power and without GPS. Friend View features a mobile client that pulls location data from the network cell ID and allows status updates from the road, and a website that is like a stripped-down Twitter, but with a map that georeferences the messages of the user and his/her friends. Another tool, Plazes, can be set to automatically send activities to the user's Twitter feed, and Mac users can download a free application called PresenceRouter that routes their Plazes status also to Tumblr, Facebook, Jaiku, and many other services. Mobile updates on Plazes are SMS-based.

Quite likely it'll still be a little while until these services offer real value to masses, and first users will have to deal with a plethora of different services before winners emerge, or there will be one application that manages to merge all the different services into one account, but for those willing to experiment these are tools worth testing.

Karri Ojanen

The Art of Campaigning

dturman — 2008-11-07T14:47:28-08:00

A couple of days ago, the Boston Globe published a truly remarkable selection of photographs from the Barack Obama campaign trail. Click here to see them all.

While Obama was not everyone's choice, these images clearly reflect the humanity of the candidate, while also conveying the magnitude of the political sea change in a most artful way.

Daniel Turman

ThreeMinds Weekly Digest 11.07.08

mstrickl — 2008-11-07T05:21:58-08:00

This was a historic week... for social media, for voting, for America.

It's undeniable that this election and the campaign of the new President-elect Barack Obama has profoundly affected the industry I work in. Up until the big day, people were predicting results by measuring social media statistics and then following electing day results on Twitter. It was an overwhelming, but addicting amount of content to consume.

Then it was over. And many of us were left wondering what would become of the social technology that powered this election. Would the new President-elect tap into his groundswell to call people into service or to crowdsource policy reform? Would he embrace cloud computing to connect all Americans with relevant government data? Could he use this technology to create a transparent transition to the White House?

Yes He Can... and http://change.gov was launched to pick up the social momentum of the campaign and actually use the power of the people to, hopefully, change not just the results of an election, but our government.

But let's turn our attention away from politics and to two of the biggest social tools used during the election, Twitter and Facebook. What's next for them? They organized and informed during an election. They may have helped win a presidency. Are they ready to wear the grown-up shoes?

Let's look at Facebook this week. First there was the announcement that they would be joining forces with SalesForce to enable developers to create business applications. Then, there was hints that Facebook Connect could be rolling out soon, offering more useful application and integration options. But people aren't waiting for that... Retailers are already using Facebook more than any other network to promote their messages via fan pages and social ads. But many fear that the more profitable Facebook advertising becomes, the less usable Facebook will be as a social network.

Not as much has been happening with Twitter. There have been some great Twitter moments in the past, all of which prove that the success of the system is in the way people are using it. People are having to become more tweet-conscious as unfollow technology is allowing them to see people who stop thinking they are relevant. But eventually, Twitter is going to have to offer something to new and useful to its users (like groups!!), or they will leave for a less noisy micromessaging systems.

Marta Strickland

Ring-A-Ding-Ding: Tell That Special IT Someone You Love Them

mhudson — 2008-11-06T12:29:00-08:00

When the computer crashes or wifi is down, everyone's favorite person in the office happens to be the IT Help Desk tech. But for those with, let's say, a more intimate IT relationship, now there's a way to symbolically show the world. Seattle jewlery artist Jana Brevick has created Jacked--Cat5 Compliant rings - a wedding set for the unconventional. Diamond's may be a girl's best friend, but nothing says "I love you" like ethernet plug sets.

Traci Armstrong

Video Games 2.0: Creating A Wikipedia Of Characters

mstrickl — 2008-11-06T05:52:51-08:00

ThreeMinds recently wrote about how video games, like LittleBigPlanet, are adding Web 2.0 functionality to the gaming experience. Another game pushing the envelope of user creation is Spore by Electronic Arts, which was released about a month ago.

When if first came out, I spent all day (literally!) playing this, and the concept is incredible: you begin as an amoeba, and move all the way up to space travel, and lets you design every aspect of the game you can think of as you go.

EA released their Spore Creature Creator quite some while ago, which allowed you to design creatures that you could use in the game. However, in the full game, there are 11 different easy-to-use but powerful editors for everything you can think of, amoeba, creatures, buildings, plants, trees, cars, spaceships - you name it. There's even a mini music creator which lets you make a little national anthem for your race!

Everything you create is uploaded into what EA calls "The Sporepedia", which creates a massive database of creatures, vehicles, buildings, spaceships, plants, and a whole bunch of other stuff which will appear randomly in your game as you go. So, every new game of Spore you play will be entirely different, and the content will be almost entirely generated of content made up by not only your friends, but the entire Spore community.

With user-created content in every new game you play, there are also a ton of advertising possibilities. For instance, we could make replicas of different Dodge, Chrysler, and Jeep vehicles and make them playable in fantastic ways within the game. Because... why drive a Dodge Viper when you can fly one?

Daryl Brewer

How Will The Vote Affect Zombie Movie Production?

mstrickl — 2008-11-05T09:36:00-08:00

image credit: io9.com

There is no denying that there has been a rebirth of the zombie movie in the past decade. There are the Resident Evil movies, the remakes and sequels to the George Romero legacy, 28 Days/Weeks Later, Planet Terror, and even the most recently released Quarantine. But the question is... why?

The team over at io9.com decided to map out the rise and fall of zombie apocalypse movies against the economic state and warfare of the USA. Turns out, violence and depression seems to make for good zombie movie inspiration.

So with the result of yesterday's election, you have to wonder... are we in for 4 more years of zombie movies or a rebirth in romantic comedies? Either way, the graph is just fun for all the info-graphics and analytics junkies/lovers out there.

Lau Ardelean