CrapHammer

The end of craphammer

A little over a year ago I set out to launch a project.  For months I would do everything in my power to work on anything else under the sun. The project scared me. There was no client. There was no one else to blame if things went wrong. And frankly, it was too close to my heart and my purpose.

Friends and associates stepped forward on every front. Without them I never would have been able to make this project see the light of day. Some designed logos for me. Others built the back end. Some stepped forward to help me on my first mini doc for the new site.

I wanted to document, speak with and understand the most passionate people I could find, whether they be artists, parents, circus performers or gardeners. I wanted to find and understand these people. I wanted to know what it was like to be them and share their motivations, tools and outlook with the rest of us.

Craphammer was a fun and key part of my professional life that has been dormant for far too long. So now it is time for me to let go and turn my attentions to the mostpassionate.ca.

I hope you will take a minute to stop by and check it out. I'll save a place for you there.

 

The Future of Publics

I don't come from this space, so speaking of "publics" in the plural freaks me out a little.  That said, this presentation rocks.  It's much closer to engagement in this new socially leveraged world of technology we live in today.

Public Media 09 Presentation | Public Media 2.0: Dynamic, Engaged Publics, by Jessica Clark and Pat Aufderheide of the Center for Social Media

View more presentations from Jessica Clark. (tags: for center)

Love and Lust

So.  You are riding a train and you see the "girl of your dreams."  She exits.  You tell yourself, "She's got a boyfriend," or "I'm not her type."  But a few hours later, you are running a fever, and all thoughts are still on her.  A day goes by and your friends refuse to hang out with you because you are beyond obsessing.  What do you do?

Well, this young man (if this is real) plays for keeps. Ya gotta check this out.

http://www.nygirlofmydreams.com/

Raises an interesting question of whether "love at first site" exists or if this is just lust in an obsessive/scary form.  There are so many things we lust after that once we get them we find we don't really want them anymore.  Whereas, once in a while, true love forms between two entities and a relationship is born.

I think that Love and Lust are important concepts when it comes to new media.  So many new tools are erupting onto the playing field every few minutes.  New social marketing sites.  New technology.  Who doesn't want an iPhone?  Or a Joost?  Or a Seesmic?

How much of this is Lust?  And how many of these companies are setting the stage for true love?  Or at least a relationship that goes past a one night stand?

Echo Generation: Are You Ready?

We've been talking a bit at my company about the Echo generation for a new project we're working on.  There appear to be strong shifts towards working together (interdependent), making things from scratch, and getting out and actively participating more.  All of this together with an increase in virtual activities makes for a very interesting stew.

In one of our recent internal discussions, Eli brought up the potential correlation to the growth of Parkour.  And so when I saw this video, I felt it both fascinating and also pertinent to understanding this emerging generation.  Not to mention that what this kid can do with a skateboard defies all odds.

WARNING:  Severe language in this video.  Paul level or higher.

Thanks to Mike Arauz for this video.

Shifting Spheres of Influence

So, while I was in Florida I realized that I had mistakenly set a post up to publish while I was away without ever finishing said post.  Pretty brilliant, eh?

So here is the re-post as I was meaning to make it.

"Social networking is not a platform, it’s not a destination, it’s a behaviour."

Katie is speaking out against this tendency of brands to worry about how they can get their brand into facebook or myspace rather than really leverage this emerging phenomenon.

I couldn't agree more.  But let's break it down a bit.

Social Networking and this whole Age of Conversation has taken the continuing fragmentation of media and made it non-linear.  If we thought the media world was fragmented before, we now have an unlimited number of forever forming and reforming communities within just one social networking site, let alone all of them combined.

Being on YouTube or Facebook doesn't guarantee viewership.  It's the same with every social networking site.  Understanding and engaging the communities within and outside of these social networking sites that matters.

So this raises a number of questions.

• How are people using these tools?
• How do different communities use the same tools?
• How do we identify the behaviors of people and communities we desire to interact with?

But as I sat and thought about this some more, I was taken back to an old associate, Stuart MacDonald, and a phrase he used to love to drop like a bomb in any meeting. 

"Where's the value?"

Consuming media is wonderful.  But it is a subset of activity that I participate in when I log into my personal spaces.  I am also looking to create media, build relationships and have conversations.   Ironically, these other activities generally result in my consuming media.  Only the media I'm consuming is directed and positioned by how the community and those I'm interacting with perceive its value.

• So is it really just a challenge of seeding as many "new media" firms would have us believe?
• How should we segment or target our engagements in a non-linear environment? (who should we engage?)
• What should we measure? (so we actually understand the value we are creating/participating in)

I'm going to go out on a limb.  What if it is all about behavior?  Could I not maximize my reach within twitter by looking to engage with all of the people on twitter that are speaking on a topic of interest to the engagement or campaign in question?  And then follow this activity into other platforms?

Calling it a "Conversation Age" is great, but we can't personally engage in a conversation with every person, customer or prospect.  And if this phenomenon is truly non-linear in nature, then that means we can't identify it in simple variables.  We would have to apply the principles of chaos to marketing.

That means it can't be seen when looking at the number of visitors to a site, the number of conversation online, views of our media or even reach or brand equity measurements. These are the individual data points and alone they tell us a misleading story.  We would have to be looking for patterns of engagement.  Ways that these (or other variables) interact and present emerging patterns.  Ultimate success would be when these patterns are stable yet non-linear in nature.  Continuing to morph and adjust as they interact with emerging communities online.

Is system thinking coming to Marketing?

C2C, the way to go.

Consumer to consumer transactions used to be a wash.  They stayed inside country borders for the most part.

But today, consumer to consumer transactions are changing the world.  Consumers are transacting serious business across country borders in ways that just didn't happen before.

Ebay, etsy lulu, shopify, etc.

Digital technologies mean that we can reach people further away.

Digital intermediaries mean we can effectively transact online.

9 year old Rhain Davies knows the power.  His grandfather posted a youtube video of his son's football highlights.  Never expecting his grandson to be found and signed by a major football club, but that's exactly what has happened.

Doc Searls is focusing a variety of these phenomenon at the Harvard University project VRM. It's worth checking out.

"VRM, or Vendor Relationship Management, is the reciprocal of CRM or Customer Relationship Management. It provides customers with tools for engaging with vendors in ways that work for both parties."

The principles are very familiar to all of us involved in this age of conversation:  User-centricity, "Reduce, Re-use, Recycle, Reciprocity, Network Effect, Relationships...  What is different is their initiatives.  This is not just talking about things.  It's engaging people to grow VRM.

"[one initiative] is making it easy for listeners and viewers of public broadcasting to pay for the goods they get on the radio or over the Net.  Right now only 10% of those listeners contribute to their public stations..."

Image Source: Nicobobinus

AMA my CGM for ROI please

Just got my latest AMA email newsletter in.  I want to say that I love the AMA (American Marketing Association.)  Up here we have the CMA (Canadian Marketing Association) and let's just say the CMA is the hick cousin of the AMA.

I tend to scan the AMA stuff pretty quickly as it dresses very traditionally.  But one article really caught my attention this week.

"Consumer-generated media (CGM) might be creating buzz among consumers, but most senior marketers remain sceptical about its value, according to a recent survey"

Nothing surprising there, eh?

But the "Just 12% of respondents rated CGM as being 'very important' to their marketing platforms" bowled me over.  It was way higher than I expected.  In a world where we are still fighting to get a decent share of budgets shifted to online, I didn't expect anyone to label CGM as very important to their marketing efforts. 

"One reason that senior marketers might be reluctant to embrace CGM is a general wariness about turning control over to consumers"

Ah.  Good old control.  The piper plays on.

And it's all summed up rather eloquently with this quote, "These marketers basically address the consumer empowerment trend by using Web sites to get consumer feedback."  Ouch.

Full AMA article.

CMA my WOM

I was given a free ticket to the CMA Word of Mouth conference today.  Thanks to the Moffitt'ster who is now going to kill me for my rant below.

My CMA Word of Mouth Rant

What gives when a word of mouth conference does not make wireless access ubiquitous and simple?  It's not like every speaker isn't talking about the power of the network to support or even drive word of mouth activity.  And it's not like we wouldn't want little sean to be able to spread the word while on-site.  So why no mention in the literature on how to get on-line???

I have to give some slack as we are talking about the CMA here.  But it's time to wake up!

On the positive side, I got to meet a few neat people as I wandered around hunting down the trail towards the secret WAP password.  In the end, I scored.  The access was pretty bad but it was there.  Okay.  On with the cool findings.

Word of Mouth in Canada

Some really interesting stuff is actually happening up here in Canada.  Who knew??

Nike

• Spoke about the global football (soccer) campaign
• Strong Nike point of view
• Engage your audience
• Involve your audience
• Respect your audience
• There will always be those who don't agree or find fault.  If you are not being authentic and involving your audience, then you deserve to be called out.

	Chevrolet (McLaren McCann) This one surprised me - letsgochevrolet.ca Integrated campaign Online:  create an avatar and use Text to speech technology to tell your story Avatars are amazingly configurable Results (in the first six weeks) 80,000 unique visitors 35,000+ avatars created Average time spent on website:  5minutes 46seconds 5% of chevrolet site activity attributed to viral area
	Monster.ca www.evalu8me.ca Brilliant.  Evaluate your style and value as an employee. Invite your friends.co-workers to evaluate you with anonymity. Limited seeding.  No compensation.  Continuing growth. Amazing tracking and data collection.

Noteworthy:

• Ogilvy and Dove not tracking anything, basically  (most of the Evolution success story was conjecture or quotes from third parties with no access to data.)
• Demographics and psychographics are dead.  Have to go deeper.  Interests.  Passions.  Etc.
• Most lift off viral is fractional.  Epidemic lift is extremely rare.

Image Credit:  NaOH

Consumers vs. The Machine

Age of Streaming approacheth.

Cam has a great post about the likelihood of consumers to stream content. eMarketer recently released some new stats as of January 2007.

As the graphs above show, the desire to stream content is becoming quite substantial.  But it gets MOST interesting when the numbers are broken down by age.  TV shows actually rate higher than User-generated videos in the youner audiences. And when we consider that these younger folks are pretty much in the most-desired category for most marketing efforts, we begin to see a substantial threat to traditional networks and a substantial opportunity for innovators.

This trend is only going to continue as fiber becomes more common place and companies like Apple continue to revolutionize the consumer entertainment experience.

Doritos shakes up the advertising world.

I have to admit that I am quite gleeful at the ongoing debate about the Doritos consumer generated Super Bowl ads.  I believe a number of big agencies are threatened.  And for good reason.  But they are over-reacting.  Read all about the debate here.

Watch the piece for yourself and you be the judge.

[embedded video follows]

Not convinced something is afoot?  Check out this chevy ad produced by students.

Consumer Generated Media vs. Co-Creation.

There is a lot of confusion between these two concepts.  And its understandable considering how close the terms are to one another.  But they are really quite distinct concepts.

Consumer Generated Media (CGM) refers to the direct act of consumers creating content and uploading it to a variety of online sites or services.  For those of us in Marketing, we often see it as consumers creating content with the intent of spoofing, supporting or even attacking a companies products, brand, marketing initiatives or any facet of the organization.  But it can also be individuals creating media about their personal views, experiences or hobbies/interests.

Co-Creation is about actively involving our customers in the process of, well, creation.  I tend to refer to it as Marketing 2.0.  It could be working together to create a show, a product or even an advertisement.  Often, the result is CGM or enabling your customers in a conversation or shared experience.  One thing that is certain is that it changes companies.  It's not about talking to your customers, it's about creating a relationship with them.

For more information on co-creation, check out my post the other week about an amazing co-creation manifesto that I still can't recommend enough.  In fact, I'm slowly giving copies to all my customers.

Tags: co-creation, CGM, Doritos, streaming content, iTV

When does language not define a person?

I'm forever awed when my world is torn and I am overcome by the pungent scent of a previously unknown prejudice.  It appears to require this  sudden jarring moment of witnessing myself in a darker light.

This video portrays the power and potential of the self publishing medium.  Namely, to taunt our perceptions of others, ourselves and the beliefs through which we interact with the world.  I have yet to see a video that impacted me this powerfully.

[embedded youtube video below]

P.S. Watch it all the way through.  You'll be glad you did.

I am still drinking in the content at Johnnie Moore's blog where I found this.  Thanks again to Gavin for leading me to him.