blending the mix

I have been looking at buzzbin tonight which is a tool for creating and sharing polls with a website visitor but also which appears in a variety of categories in buzzbin itself (where member/users contribute the questions being asked).

I think this may be a great, quick way of soliciting feedback from visitors so am launching my own survey below:

The motivation for this particular survey is to try and get an idea of reason’s why business don’t enter into the social media game whole-heartedly. From experience, I know there are a ton of other reasons why businesses don’t do so, but the ones in the survey are the most frequently-heard ones. Got any other ideas/reasons? Let me know paul dot fabretti at gmail dot com.

I’d love to have your opinion so feel free to tell me what you think above!

I have to admit to not knowing any of the other blogs in the same category when the shortlist came out other than Mike’s Techcrunch. That alone makes me think I have some bloody stiff opposition, let alone now that I have seen the other nominees:

* Brian Kelly’s UK Web Focus: Reflections on the Web and Web 2.0
* Roo Reynolds - What’s Next?, “UK-based Metaverse Evangelist, blogger and geek”
* Eightbar from Hursley Park
* DRM blog by CapGemini’s Jude Umeh, from BCS
* Middledigit.net, by Jonathan Hopkins and covers Web 2.0, technology and marketing
* Broadstuff.com from Broadsight
* TechCrunch UK
* Blending the Mix: A look at the new world and new marketing and all it means…
* Paul Downey: Whatfettle, marras?
* User Pathways by James Kelway
* Ian White and Michael Pincher’s blog on collaborative technologies,

And I can’t go without encouraging you to vote for one of my two pals below (who unfortunately reside in the same category):

Steve from Microsoft and Stephen from Rainier PR. Both are really, really good blogs written by two very smart (and successful) guys to boot! If you have to vote - give each of these guys a vote!

Oh…and don’t forget to give the guys at Outside Line a vote too. IMHO, the LG Blog is the benchmark for blogger outreach (and that is no slight on the wonderful work that David et al. do either!).

Don’t get me wrong, these blogs are all good, but if you DON’T vote for me, I’ll get Viacom’s lawyers to force your ISP to give me your IP address…and I’ll come round with some little friends!

Icon + Anthem = work of genius

Perspective 1 - The Writers

Visit youtube these days and you are highly likely to come across a rogue’s gallery of really popular videos.

They are people you wouldn’t look twice at in the street - your Average Joe’s - but these Average Joe’s just happen to have written some of the funniest things on TV and Cinema and are taking these talents online on their own.

Heard of Jason Ross or Matt Selman or even Bob Kushell?

They work on The Daily Show, The Simpsons and The Simpsons/Malcolm in the Middle respectively. These are funny people. (don’t take my word for it, watch the vids!)

Their ability to make really funny content with none of the fluff of fake-tan-laden chat-shows demonstrates that with the web, it doesn’t matter who you are, what you look like or how old you are - if you’re funny, you’re funny.

I absolutely admire the writer’s stance (more on that to follow), because it is allowing the people with the REAL talent to show who is the monkey and who is the organ grinder and it’s not the slimy, white-toothed host or big-busted talent-less actress either.

Does anybody know who the Evolution of Dance guy is? No? Me neither, but his original no-frills stage show has netted him 72,109,974 views.

The long and short of this first part of the post is this: the web now provides the tools to make anyone a star. The writer’s stance demonstrates this. it can also make a company look ridiculous if it doesn’t have an awareness of the power of this medium.

Perspective 2 - The Film Industry

I can see one, disastrous thing happening as a result of this strike and the winner won’t be the writers, it will be the studios. Bottom of the pile will be us - the consumer.

Here’s how I see it panning-out: The Movie and TV studios decide to settle. The writer’s get paid what they want, the studios pay what they want to pay. The only thing is that in order to settle the dispute quickly, NOBODY has realised how they are going to pay for it.

The studios aren’t going to absorb the costs, the writers aren’t going to give anything away. Advertiser’s aren’t going to pay more for the same ad space, so where is it going to land? In our laps.

And I reckon the could well use HD/Blu-Ray to do it. An emerging technology with a relatively unknown price-point is an ideal place to hide the increase.

OK, so this kind of argument is along the lines of the Team America F.A.G. (big corporations and all that!) so someone tell me WHERE is the money coming from?

Thanks to Loic Le Meur, I have 4 invitations to Seesmic to give away.

I will give one invite away each day, for the next 4 days, starting tomorrow to the person leaving the best suggestion as to what the most exciting technological development of 2008 will be.

(Seesmic is in pre-Alpha or pre-Beta Alpha or something like that so invites are like rocking-horse doo-doo).

What’s Seesmic? The best way I can explain it is Twitter with Video.

What’s Twitter? Jesus, where have you been this year?!!

Quite simply it is all about short, sharp messages.

Like the Facebook status (if you have to ask what that is, the please leave now!), it lets friends know what you are doing, what you are thinking, or quite simply chip in to other people’s conversations with something useful (or useless).

Seesmic is new in that it allows short, sharp conversations to take place using video and is backed (financially) by Michael Arrington amongst others and totally supported by heavy-duty bloggers such as Hugh MacLeod, Dennis Howlett and the man himself, Robert Scoble. It is as close to having a conversation online as current short-messaging systems allow.

Techcrunch reports tonight that Microsoft are looking to invest between £150-£250million in Facebook for a 5% stake. This values Facebook at around £5billion! The WSJ reckons Facebook are holding out for around £7.5 billion - certainly a damn sight more than Yahoo’s original £500million!

Anyway, what makes this move really exciting is that it enables Microsoft much better access to something/anything that NONE of their competitors have.

• Google blows MS away on Search and Online Ads.
• Yahoo has display ads nailed
• Microsoft has…Vista (to be fair, its Windows Live and office 2007 products rock!).

Microsoft is crying out for something in its portfolio that nobody else does and Facebook is that thing. Furthermore, I can’t help but think that becoming a bigger part of Facebook is a sign of greater things to come out of Microsoft - and it is all down to the one thing it doesn’t do very well at - advertising.

I can’t help but think that with access to so many social graphs at its disposal, Microsoft (with Facebook’s assistance) can’t learn enough to create a killer advertising platform that will be able to serve such contextual and massively relevant ads that it would blow anything on the market out of the water. And when it finds a way to create this killer contextual ad machine - it is able to serve them to the fastest growing social network out there.

Maybe I am simply finding some more love for MS after spending more time with my Dell laptop but I can’t help but feel that this is the start of a massively exciting road for Microsoft.

Either that or the little blue monster just can’t help mixing it with other little blue monster’s!!

UPDATE: WSJ is on the same line of thought as me:

But an investment in Facebook could give Microsoft or Google greater opportunities to tie their services in with Facebook at a time when they’ve both recognized that social networking is changing how consumers tap into their core activities, such as Web search and email.

The Facebook approach is also part of Microsoft’s urgent attempt to strengthen its ad "platform," which lets advertisers automatically place ads on Web sites and on Microsoft’s Internet search engine.

Then again, this news might be just as exciting.

Tags: Facebook, Microsoft, Techcrunch, blue monster

In a stark statement of "we haven’t got a bloody clue what it means yet but we desperately want to sound like we do…until we do" Rory Sutherland, Ogilvy’s executive creative director insults all our intelligence with a thinly veiled piece of 1990′s reminiscent PR crap stating in a terrible piece of marketing journalism:

"Like any community, you have to earn your place within it."

No, really…I am mean REALLY is that what we need to do?

It gets better:

"Brands must demonstrate their value, rather than preach to the audience."

Revolutionary. Truly revolutionary thinking.

Then again, this coming from a company promoting "Global 360 Degree Brand Stewardship®" - in other words, going round in circles…

To be fair to Rory (who I do not know) precisionmarketing’s appallingly conceived, clearly sponsored article is a sham and even originates as something to do with Equifax and how social networks are rife for ID thieves. Did Rory really know what drivel he was being part of?

Do these people really think this type of journalism still washes?

What utter, pathetic journalism. Is this really as good as modern marketing journalism get?

Precision Marketing - be aware that better print magazines are going out of business and they infinitely more on the ball than you.

As the incomparable Hugh MalLeod puts it:

"Technology changes - humans don’t"

Tags: ogilvy, precisionmarketing, facebook, equifax, marketing, journalism, pr, gapingvoid, hugh

Maybe I am months if not years behind, but in doing some research for a client, I noticed just how powerful Google Maps could be for chainstores.

Get your stores on Google Maps and let people see what you do, how you do it, why you are worth a visit. Let others join you in adding comments about your facilities.

Say you are a coffee house…tell people about your local cake specialities, if you are a club or bar, publish special events. If you are a gift store, highlight something different.

BLOG…lik to your blog…let people see another reason to visit you.

In my experience in-site store locators do nothing more than give you an address and phone number - here is a great opportunity to have so much more to say than a name and address.

Tags: google, googlemaps, blogging

If honesty was a business, you’d buy from it.

If honesty was a currency, it’d be traded more than the dollar.

If you don’t think one guy stood in the snow in front of a supermarket talking about himself and his feelings is the future of marketing then you are truly missing a major shift in consumer attitudes.

Hugh…this one’s for you…

Tags: tesco, gapingvoid, blogging, hughmcleod

…there ain’t nothing evil about luurvve!