L.B.C

Good afternoon subscribers, friends, family, small pet owners, ladies and gentlemen and finally Realtime Media fanatics... 

my weeklee lesson:july 21st, 2010

I thought I'd kick of my blogging career with a post on social media which seems to be hotter than the current temperature in Philadelphia (currently 93 degrees).

Touching on the earlier post, “All Hail the King” The big fad around town, well around all towns is LOCATION BASED SOCIAL MEDIA. Now to the people who think Big Brother is more than a TV show they ask, why would I tell people where I am, what I'm doing and who really cares to know where my friends are?

Well frankly thanks to the newest statistics it seems a good number do…

As of July 21^st - Big news, Foursquare just hit their 100,000,000th check-in. I'd like to say my 100 plus check'ins helped but I much like most I'm fairly new to Foursquare...

What does that mean to you? Well in the past week via Foursquare check-ins I’ve gotten free tacos, a free pint at a microbrewery, a free t-shirt, free movie tickets and a ticket to a comedy show. More importantly Foursquare has personally brought much joy to myself and Realtime Media.

You ask how?

Well they have brought to the good people of Realtime = L.B.C – (Location Based Competitions).

Along with Sales checking in for coffee, and Creative Dept & Developers checking in at the newest lunch spot, its lead to internal check-in competitions.

Here are few photos the Mayor’s have proudly display to show who’s boss, well who’s Mayor.

The second picture is the office of our Director of Business Development who isn’t even the Mayor of his own office. Interesting isn’t it? I think so... 

 

Click to view large

Download this gallery (ZIP, undefined KB)

Download full size (1809 KB)

Stay tuned for more updates...and have a great day!

Cheers,
Chris

www.rtm.com

After a long, drawn-out and bitterly fought battle, Will has captured the "crown" of Foursquare Mayor at Realtime Media - RTM HQ.  It's a title I've held nearly uninterrupted for over a year and today is a sad day.  However, I say 'Long Live the King'.

Now, I need only to capture the Mayorship of my own office or, at the very least Wendy L's cube...one of our other Programmer's workstation.  It's great that Location Based Services can illicit such competitiveness...and, thankfully no one was hurt!

As a marketer, I can't help but get worked up waking through Times Square - in addition to being the epicenter of the civilized world (at least according to Madonna), it's also a haven for advertising and marketing.  Builders and developers are required to dedicate a certain amount of space to advertising....where most municipalities want less clutter, Times Square actually encourages it.

This week on a day of appointments,  Chris and I were trudging through Times Square(I say trudging because it was 98 degrees with a heat index of 114!) and we came across an amazing use of augmented reality.   Forever 21 has an amazing, bigger-than-life billboard which uses a video camera to capture passers-by in real time and incorporate people into the billboard.  Here's a great article about how it works.  

“In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities; in the expert's mind there are few.”

Shunryu Suzuki-roshi

Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind

The above is one of my favorite quotes.  It means seeing things as they truly are, with fresh eyes and without prejudice, bias and assumption.      

This quote can be applied to practically any aspect of life but I can’t help thinking about how it relates to Social Media.  There are certainly no shortage of “experts” touting best practices, pushing engagements and listening tools all while telling people to create conversations.  And certainly, many of them are smart businesspeople who are adapting to the rapidly changing world of marketing and media.

BUT, there’s probably no better place in business for a ‘Beginner’s Mind’ than Social Media.  Truly there are no experts…there is no ‘right way’ and no one has it all figured out...the medium is too new, too fluid and evolving too quickly.  So, why not approach this with our Beginner’s Mind…remain open to possibilities, don’t judge, assume or over-analyze.  Keep an open mind and try to see things as they truly are.

If you’re interested in reading more, I’d highly recommend going right to the source – Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind is available here.

This week I attended the Social Media Plus conference in Philadelphia.  It was a good showing for my hometown with nearly 800 people in attendance.  I was proud that The City of Brotherly Love could draw people who are into and interested in Tech and Social Media from all over. 

The event featured some great home-grown talent in the Digital Marketing, Media and Social Media space…notables including Beth Harte, Gloria Bell and Philly's own Rock Star of Social Media,  Frank Eliason from Comcast  .  Plus, some great presentations from Kevin Popovic who provided some terrific, practical lessons on how to utilize Social Media in Business Development,  and  a compelling opening keynote from Rohit Bhargava  

More info on the event is available here:  www.socialmediaplus.com and a great recap of the event can be found here. 

I had to laugh this week when my iPhone Pandora app served up this great ad - for a Funeral Home while playing 'The Killers'. 

For all the good that contextual advertising can (should?) provide, there are plenty of really bad examples.  Check out this blog for lots more:

http://badcontextualads.tumblr.com/

And, this one from Steve Irwin's unfortunate demise:

http://www.shmula.com/194/steve-irwins-death-contextual-advertising-gone-bad

All of this talk about Facebook’s privacy policies, Twitter’s incorporating sponsored ads into streams and audio commercials appearing in Pandora stations has me wondering – what are consumers’ expectations when using free services?  I’ve seen tons of complaints of Twitter ‘selling out’, people blogging about how they don’t want to hear ads on Pandora and, of course, the world appears to be up in arms over Facebook and privacy.

My question is – what is selling out when those companies need to pay their workers, cover their expenses and ideally turn a profit?  How can we, as consumers of a free product, service or tool, expect these companies to oblige us when we’re really not ‘customers’ of theirs at all?

I’m reminded of my time as Director of Advertising Sales at BlogTalkRadio.  If you’re not familiar, check them out – BTR is a terrific service that gives anyone, anywhere the ability to host their own talk radio show in real time – including taking phone calls and utilizing a chat room…all through a browser and a phone.  It’s completely free for both hosts and listeners.  And, when the live shows finish airing, it is automatically uploaded as a podcast and archived.

When I joined the company, we began inserting pre-roll commercials in the podcasts…and the outcry was immediate.  People were incensed that we would ruin their shows and ‘sell out’.  I spent hours responding to emails from hosts – explaining to them that we would only work with appropriate advertisers and do everything we could to match sponsors with relevant content.  While I understood those hosts concerns over the shows they put their hearts and souls into, I couldn’t help but wonder what they expected…when they were using BlogTalkRadio’s FREE service to reach their audiences and promote their businesses.

So, how much is too much?  How many search ads will you see in your Twitter stream before you say enough is enough?  (And, where would you go as an alternative?).  Pandora does have other more competitors which gives listeners choice.  And Facebook…well, they had competition once, before MySpace became irrelevant.  What do YOU expect?

Sometimes in history we look back and see some huge gaping holes in the logic of certain ideas that in retrospect seem obvious, but I’m sure looked like really good ideas at the time. Keeping bloodlines pure for the monarchies. Land wars in Asia. The launch of New Coke. Interest only mortgages.

So now, with everyone from my Grandfather to kinda Mark Zuckerberg to Katie Couric to the Senate and the Supreme Court weighing in on privacy in some way or another, I have to start wondering if we all haven’t made a critical logic flaw all the way back in the pre-millennial days. Maybe we as individuals made a mistake in expecting websites to hold our information and keep it private. More importantly, maybe we as publishers and marketers made a mistake in ever being willing to classify [most] of the information that we allow to flow through our systems as private.

Should we have attempted to provide some sort of anonymity of collectible data? Should we have pushed for a greater responsibility for information from individuals online?

Is the true, fearsome power of Twitter not in the 140 character get-anywhere messaging platform but in the “everything is public” concept that quite simply states:

Everything you put here is public. It is accessible for the world to follow. It is accessible for the world to forward. It will not go away. You are responsible for all that you say. You are in control: you create and consume as much or as little as you want. 

Is that the lightning that titans Facebook and Google are really chasing? And if so, is it too late for the rest of to learn from it and revise our models on what we really need to market?

I know… What about SPAM? Phishing? No privacy policy seems to have stopped it. Without them, wouldn’t the vendors that are less transparent and ethical fall away through scourge and disuse just like now?

This may be more questions than opinion, but I’d be very interested in hearing yours. Please email back, or leave comments.

So this week’s Facebook F8 conference brought sweeping new changes to more than just the 400 million Facebook users, it seems a bracing wind has swept across the internet itself bringing Like buttons and fanboxes to every site, page and post. TechCrunch asks has Facebook “seized control of the Internet” and Adage jokes that FB is approaching Skynet.

But with this opening up of communication that allows you one-click access to like almost any piece of content and see who among your FB community likes it too comes a worrisome loosening of privacy restrictions that have everyone from the Electronic Frontier Foundation to Consumerist to Valleywag and even CNet up in arms.

But more importantly little fishies, haven’t we seen attempts at global online information domination before? And did we already forget what happened to the behemoths of the internet that dared to go plowing into the vastness of the Russian Front that is the Online world?

“Just Type AOL Keyword” . Yahoo! . Microsoft Passport . Myspace/ . Google .  Fwump! Fwump! Fwump! Fwump!

“I’ve got a better idea, a better idea… Oh it’s the same idea…”

It’s not necessarily that they are the same idea, or bad ideas. It’s just that the internet and online world itself is growing and moving so fast and so fluidly that it is like trying to put a leash on the ocean. You can’t. You can only hope to fish, or contain a part of it, but not rule the entire thing, because it may not actually be a thing by the time you’ve decided what it is.

So as marketers we need to be mindful of our past and cast our nets mindful of our future— for ourselves and for our clients. There is our back yards, the Russian Front, there is the world, and beyond.

And now, from the Internets...

Speaking of Hilter, the classic "Downfall" meme took a turn for the newsy when copyright claims and the DMCA causing all of the parody videos to be wiped from You Tube and most of the internet this past week.

Boy was he pissed.

This has highlighted many issued regarding what is fair use, and what technologies are employed to remove content from sites. Although they can detect content is copyrighted, they cannot tell how it is being used.

The Twitterverse, is still trying to convince Justin Bieber to marry it. Why Twitterverse... Why?