Digital Influence Mapping Project

The Best Advertising Education From the Adcenter (and Oscar)

Yesterday, I had a great opportunity to speak to the current classes at VCU's Adcenter. 150 graduate students in the #1 advertising school in the country. It was atypical for me as the head of a digital influence business within a public relations agency to be addressing these students who are all immersed in the lessons of Bill Bernbach, David Ogilvy and their descendants.

The session focused on the great opportunity we all have as communicators because of the confluence of social media, peer-to-peer word of mouth and technology. We can move beyond considering how to "reach" consumers or "target audiences" to how to "engage" this new wave of content creators. Engagement has been a foundation of our 360° Digital Influence team since the beginning. And I was just talking with Pete Blackshaw about his own initiative to define how to quantify and define "engagement".

Many thanks to Peter C. (great lunch, thank you), Karen, Ashley and Rick B. I had a terrific time. Your students are way sharp.

In the middle of the presentation, someone asked a hypothetical question about a dog named Oscar.

The Dog Controversy

Turns out it isn't hypothetical. While I know the Adcenter wants the story to go away, I see this as a valuable "teachable moment." But probably not for the obvious reasons. Here's the short story as documented in the press:

"It all began last week when Mike Lear, an adjunct professor at the Adcenter, gave his creative-thinking class an assignment involving his dog.

"Your assignment is to make my 6-year-old pug, Oscar, famous," Lear said, as part of written instructions to his class.

Then things exploded.

A user of MySpace, a social-networking Web site, made a blog posting that said he was going to kill Oscar online this week.

The user identified himself as Jason, a 19-year-old male _ a swinger _ from Richmond.

Around the globe, through the reach of the Internet, people began expressing concern and outrage about the possible online slaughter of Oscar.

The Adcenter began receiving calls from animal activists and others expressing alarm, administrators said.

Richmond police were contacted, and dispatched officers to the Adcenter.

Police subsequently issued a media alert saying it had been determined that "this threat is the result of a VCU student's assignment that went awry. We want to stress that at no time was any animal in danger."

So 38,000 Google search results later, the word has spread. The teachers instructions were clear:

""You cannot harm my dog in any way. You cannot kill my dog. And your idea cannot hinge on either," he said, in a written memo."

So, the student may be expelled. Everyone is outraged at the false threat - it smacks of yelling "fire" in the crowded theater.

A Great Lesson

But there is a better lesson here and one that the student should not be expelled for. I spoke to the students about honesty and authenticity in social media. And while I do not believe social media is inherently either one of these, it is those bloggers and vloggers whom I read and watch who do share something authentic and often from the heart that excites me most about this new wave in communications. We have a great opportunity to engage people online and respect their trust. Any kind of hoax whether it be LonelyGirl15 or Oscar tricks people when they are vulnerable. Any advertiser trying to build brand loyalty (unless the brand is "Punk'd") through these means may achieve awareness but they will never reach brand loyalty.

So, who cares what the smart aleck kid said. The fact that we are not talking about how to engage people honestly and authentically is the bigger crime. And I know the Adcenter, for one is very interested in doing just that. They have built a formidable training ground for the agency of today and are poised to make those additions that will train students for a different agency landscape in the future. That agency requires students smart in many disciplines: advertising, digital, PR, CRM, etc...

So, cut the student a break. Let's invest in more dialogue about how to marry the tremendous storytelling capabilities of advertising  with the new demand for openness and transparency towards the goal of engaging people.

"Engagment" cannot be defined by how long I look at an advert. To me, it includes involvement (like conversation), time spent, relevancy and personal investment. Brands that engage me matter more.

I know lots of folks who would volunteer to lead this discussion.

Get Involved in the Video Storytelling

Last week, I was talking with Todd Herman, GM Media Strategy at MSN, at a Video on the Web roundtable. He gave a great talk at the front end of the meeting which then segued into a discussion about different storytelling paradigms. He raised the question or challenge - will innovation happen all the way to the root of the 7 or so storytelling paradigms. 

I would argue that Have Money Will Vlog is a fresh storytelling paradigm. I posted on the first installment and now there is a new one. This time Maria Gomez, a vlogger and trained ethnographer will augment her interviews of Columbian expats in this country with a project shot in Columbia that tries to unvover the issues surrounding this exceptional migration. Here's how the Have Money Will Vlog site describes the project:

"Maria Gomez, a Colombian resident of New York City, has begun a video documentary project interviewing other Colombian people affected by this period of social upheaval and change.

Maria, who is trained in ethnographic data collection for anthropological research, has already interviewed many in the Colombian immigrant community of New York. She needs financial backing for a 4 month trip through Colombia gathering the stories of those still waiting to make the journey North."

All she needs is $2100 to pull the trigger on the trip. This kind of crowdfunding is infectious. The one thing they are not doing this time is the wiki that collected donors ideas about what or how to shoot. This may have been more an attribute of the first two projects:

1. Seven Maps
2. Sustainable Route

But I miss the wiki. I want to doate and I want to make suggestions. I perfectly bow to the vlogger or advisory team ("Filters") to assess and include or reject those suggestions. It just felt good 'cause i was able to express my interest and passion for their project beyond just donating. Still Have Money Will Vlog is a great idea.

Co-creation and Samuel Adams Pt2

Samuel Adams (The Boston Beer Company) ran an interesting Homebrew co-creation challenge a while back. You can see my post describing it here. I reached out to their CEO, Jim Koch, to get his take on whether it was successful or not. they have picked winners. The short story is that they invited homebrewers in to submit their brews. Top winners would see their recipes productized by Samuel Adams.

Jim Koch reminded me that he was a homebrewer and that is what drove him into the business. So the Homebrew Challenge program is "close to his heart". They have actually been doing this type of co-creation since the mid-90's. He didn't seem too concerend about hard measurement although I know he knows the number. I got the sense that he simply believes in the program and its place as one "tile in the larger mosiac of who we are as a company. If people respond to that great."

It was great to get his email. I sense that he is a true enthusiast. It comes across in their TV advertising as well.

Idea Bar #5: Movie Location Social Media Tours

This one's for all those cities who have a reasonable amount of film locations in their history (or at least one great one - The Great Santini in what southern city???)

I shared about the Capitol of Punk tour. Now Random Culture reports on the interactive map from the NYC Mayor's Office of Film and Television celebrating 40 years of movie location shooting in NYC.  The map is pretty cool. In mashup-style, you can click on a push pin and get a movie title, links to IMDB and possibly a thumbnail. It's also nowhere near any of the tourism resources for the city so it remains an insider's resource.

Ok, compare it Ironic Sans interactive map of Ghostbusters. Click on one of the two logos (he covers Ghostbusters I & II) and you get pop-ups with pictures and great descriptions like this one for the Holy Trinity Lutheran Church:

"The Stay Puft Marshmallow Man steps
on this church. Mother puss bucket!
Nobody steps on a church in my town!"

I lived in NYC when that was being filmed and was in fact shooting another movie across the street near city hall when they shot that scene of the army being deployed (cue Ghostbusters theme). Suddenly we are hearing an enthusiast's voice which is ten time more interesting.

The Idea already:

These are great places to start but let's get people invoved. Let's invite citizens and travelers to shoot photos of key movie locations in their city. Local newspapers do this from time to time. But I am talking about creating a living database of images. Encourage people to capture the Excorcist steps (DC) at just the angles used in the movie (and not just that one angle that is always reproduced). How many times was the bar at 7th & B in NYC used as a location? What are the angles on that famous horshoe-shaped bar?

Pictures would pour in. People would become prolific contributors and given "WeeGee" status with special perks - movie tickets? We would encourage a cadre of enthusiasts in cities all across the country (globe?).

If I were traveling to Atlanta, I could download the tour for Manhunter or Freejack (I was in the city for that one. Mick Jagger was renting a mansion in Buckhead) or a mix of different films. I could then capture my own images of those locations in a kind of scavenger hunt and upload them.

What happens next? The inevitable. People start creating their own videocast re-creations of famous scenes. Think about how that is already a phenomena from Lego-enacted Star Wars to that whole ridiculous, shot-by-shot remake of Psycho.

Then we add location-specific mobile phone tours. Text a number and hear the dialogue between Robert Deniro and Jody Foster on her stoop in Taxi Driver as you stand in the exact spot it was shot .

Did you notice all me personal anecdotes about where I was when a film was shot? (I have a pretty funny one about the Toxic Avenger) Encourage people to post those personal stories within the virtual tours.

Clearly this idea will work best in a city where either a lot of films have been shot or some real humdingers were shot. There is a site currently that tries to list worldwide movie locations but it lacks any social element (and no great photography).

The movie business has fans. Specific movies have fans. I've been to the building that served as the front of the hotel in Kubrick's The Shining. I am a huge Kubrick fan but that would be a global romp.

A Fanbase to Die For

While I am not a fan of Wilco, I know several people who are. Clearly they are an active bunch remiscent of the Dead/Phish enthusiasm where there are a slew of diehard fans who go to multiple shows, collect images and setlists, voraciously consume all news on the band and feel (and are) connected.

And here's what they have over (place name of almost any band here): WilcoBase. Or, more accurately, all that WilcoBase includes and represents. It represents the efforts of  a core set of very active fans supported by lesser efforts from a more distributed fan base. Check out the credits page and you will see what I mean. It's hard to tell who is doing all the work. I am guessing that Jane the Timeline Chick contributed a lot of historical data.

Here is where the exceptional record lies:

Where's Wilco: a Google Maps mashup of historical set lists. There is a tremendous record of set lists within the site and in Where's Wilco they show up as pins on the map. Only North American shows are pegged. But what's more impressive?

Stats, etc...: This section includes features like Every Time Played which will tell you all the setlists that have included a particular song (and Wilco has published a gazillion songs. This is the front end of a database of set lists that can tell you not just when a song was played but what song came before it in the set and after. I love this kind of fan-driven obsessive compulsive disorder. And while I am not a Wilco fan, I am a fan and could easily have done this for Nick Cave.   

Lastly, check out Songs Played. That's where you will find that "Walken" was played 97.1% or 33 times in 2006 in shows.

Most of the press around Wilco has been about their astute move to release music for free on the Web prior to an ablum release (e.g. Yankee Hotel Foxtrot). But the resource at WilcoBase indicates an enduring fan commitment that most bigger bands would die for.

Sidebar: here's an interesting Brandpulse graph for the past 6 months. Even though, Wilco's post numbers are below Mariah Carey and Franz Ferdinand (random on purpose), there is a steady horizontal pattern whereas the other two drop off. That is the pattern I would expect with such an active fanbase.

WOM Conference Highlights from Today

Pete Blackshaw of P&G and Intelliseek fame shared to a small room of marketers (whom I will speak to at 2:15 today) about keeping it simple by asking your customers if they blog. The point is that they are more likely. Here's a brief on other points he made:

• Speakers vs. seekers: are speakers atypical? They are the advertisers getting in the face of consumers: fastest growing content in search engines. And he of course made a "shelf space" analogy. If their content is dominating search results they are pushing marketers messages.   Easy concept to imagine.
• Buy keywords during a rumor cycle: this is actually PR 101 and something we have been doing for years
• 'Day in the Life' video - Pete asked staffers to document how their lives and consumers lives are affected by cgm. The video is pretty fluffy covering territory most of us already know (I presume the aduience I am in now at the conference was surveyed and are less involved in cgm todate). Still it's nice to see the faces of Intelliseek.
• cgm (squared) - Pete's coined a term for the multimedia-enhanced era we are going through now.
• Largest builder of buzz in tech: customer service

Here's the Key Metrics they use to rate influence:
Volume
Reach
Dispersion
Sentiment
Emotion
Issue
Source
Author
(blended with other data: site traffic, TV ratings, purchase behavior, sales data - Ahh, this is the Nielsen promise behind his new company, Nielsen BuzzMetrics)

• Next evolution of Six Sigma thinking: he used an auto industry example - Toyota - that is starting to consider all the outlyer comments in the long tail regardless of that comment/messages reach.
• The listening paradox: the boss thinks they are conversational and listeners, the customer service center must follow the training manual and get off the phone asap. The bigger your listening "pipe" the more conversational you can be.

Virgina Miracle from Brains on Fire spoke. Brains, like Ogilvy, are members of WOMMA. I am actually a fan of what they did for Fiskars as I am obesessed with co-creation. Check out the site:

• 92% WOM happens offline - no news here. In our work with BzzAgent, we know that offline WOM is dominant.
• 62% of sentiment in WOM is positive but what is the differential between online WOM and offline? This is a Keller/Fay stat. Virginia suggested that she asked Ed Keller about the differential but it is not known at this time.

John Moore from Brand Autopsy spoke and was smart and hysterical at the same time. His site has long been a link on my blog. Check him out.

Amanda Across America - She's baaack!

So Amanda Congden has a TV deal, a magazine column and a vlogging trek across America. There was plenty of speculation that following her split with RocketBoom, that she might slip into MTV/VJ obscurity. Being a fan of both RocketBoom and Amanda, I doubted that would happen.

Here's the video that Dina posted at the Blip.tv site from their party for her. And if you visit her site, AmandaAcrossAmerica.com you can follow her adventures relocating to the West Coast.

Here's her first installment from today. Strange homage to LonelyGirl 15. She is currently sponsored by Environmental Countdown, thus, the Ford Hybrid. Not much to say about these guys as their site is not up. Which makes me wonder what they are getting out of the sponsorship. Is that a cause she is personally aligned with? I would have like to have seen a bigger sponsorship that would have helped re-launch her (like when Sting did those Jaguar ads). Oh well, that's just my self-interest talking.

I am glad she is back. I am sure the trip will be fun. I wish I could go.....

Nickelodeon jumps in with Parentsconnect.com

Nickelodeon has finally launched a parenting site - Parentsconnect.com (careful to add the "s") according to my trusty Media Daily. The site offers message boards, a local guide (fueled by the acquisition of GoCityKids.com), and members profiles/directory functions. It sounds promising as they are marrying social media - content created by the users - with local information. Do parent's want to create these captured-system blogs vs. their own blogs out...there? I don't know. But they have plenty of other features going on. The Nickelodeon brand - not there for now. It is in the "about us".

Rohit's Idea Bar #2: Virtual travel Guides

Check out Rohit's second Idea Bar. It tackles the age old problem of customized travel guides (the need for them). We are doing a yard sale right now (super painful - why are they not scopping up my wonderful stuff?). As I was sorting out books, I found about 5 guides to Venice from a trip two years ago. I bought five because each had a little something I wanted (or needed....).

But what a waste. Rohit's idea includes custom publishing only the stuff you really want. I would pay good money for that.

Here's a bit of his Idea Bar idea:

"Imagine if the guides could include a sliding scale to allow travellers to select to only display luxury or budget accomodation, more images or less images, and off-the-beaten-track or major tourist destinations.  Even letting travellers reorder the content of a guide to match the sequence of the destinations they will be visiting would offer great value. "

Smart stuff.

26 Steps to Analog Voting in the Digital Age

This past Tuesday was, of course, the primary elections in Maryland and DC (and the rest of the country). I love to vote. It feels like the least that I can do and I always try to do the least that I can do....

So here's how it went:

1. I get up early to get to the polls when they open - 7am
2. I arrive at the Middle School which is lined with last-minute campaign workers extolling the virtues of all the candidates. They seem to be obeying the invisible no-fly zone by the doors.
3. I cross through the bushes and get intercepted by my friend Nina who hands me a 6x8" card listing out all of the progressive candidates. Very well designed, we both comment. This will come in handy later on...
4. The line to get to the first table is already out the door. I'm thinking 20 minutes to step one.
5. 10 minutes later, people start trickling out: "they don't have the electronic voting cards and don't know when they will." Well, this turns out to be the story all over Montgomery County. And in the computing trades.
6. The man in front of me laments, "I can't come back. I got here early 'cause that's the only time..."
7. I bolt. No way I am waiting until the cards may or may not show up. I find out later they didn't arrive until at least an hour later.
8. Long day at work. Prepping a viral video campaign. Tweaks on an issue ad campaign. Adjustments to our momblogger project. The usual.
9. I hear that the polls will be open an hour later - 9pm - due to the flub. I leave work in time to get back to the polling place at 7:50pm.
10. Same campaign workers hovering like tired bees outside the doors to the school. Same line-length.
11. I get in line figuring the 15 minutes or so but it's not moving. Rumours are spread by a campaign worker that they will stop using the electronic voting machines at 8pm.She says everyone in line by 8pm will get to vote on the machines.
12. A poll worker comes along the line and, sure enough, the voting machines are being shut down promptly at 8pm. Everyone will now have to use provisional voting (paper ballots). I like the machines and am severly bummed. I also realize that the process will now take longer. I am determined to vote. I ask her why the machines must go off. "I am under orders to turn them off. I don't know why."
13. The man in front of me asks if he would be shunned if he just walked away. because we are in Takoma Park , I tell him "yes."
14. Okay, so here's the overview of the new process (which I only learned a little at a time): Line #1 takes you to three poll workers who take your name verifying your identity by asking DOB, address. You get a little printout thingee. Line #2 leads to a table with 2 poll workers: the only two who know how to do proviisonal voting. This is clearly going to be the giant sphincter.
15. I make it through line one and join the end of line two. About 14 people ahead of me. I keep examining what the two poll workers are doing - filling out yellow forms, giving voters multi-page voting forms. Some people peel off to fill out the forms on the multipurpose tables (which have been multiplying as a tired custodian opens them reluctantly)
16. The man behind me grabs a folding chair: smart move.
17. NOW THE WHOPPER: They have just run out of Democratic voting forms (of course they are fine on the Republican ones). They have requested more from Rockville (1 hour away). It is now 8:30pm.
18. The poll worker quiets everyone to make an announcement. Someone keeps talking and she threatens to have them removed. Someone in the line says, "leave her alone." I am thinking mob revolt. There are about 50 voters in the room in one line or another.
19. ANNOUNCEMENT: 'yes, there are no forms. we want you to write your votes on a scrap of paper.' A SCRAP OF PAPER. She hands out scraps from some pad of voting instructions which no longer have any relevance. 
20. A voter offers to read off the candidates from some form she got in the mail so that people know the choices. Everyone scrambles for a bench at the tables. I don't have a pen. A tired poll worker hands me one. I remaiin standing hoping that gets me to the giant sphincter sooner.
21. Remember that list of progressive candidates (Step 3)? I pull that out. I think for a moment of just putting my name on that and handing it in. But that's got to be wrong.
22. I copy all the names onto the scrap of paper. I put my name on the top not sure if am supposed to or not. Maybe I am nominating myself.
23. The scene is chaos. Many of us are taking it for the existentialist test that it is. Some are angry. Jamie Raskin, candidate for State Senate comes in. I watch as he tries to understand what is going on. He shakes his head like trying to clear cobwebs. Soon he is on the cell phone talking with a judge or the governor-to-be.
24. I get to the table while the bingo game call-out is till going on. The very tired poll worker slides a foirm to me to fill out.
25. I bust through the form and am back at the table before they finish calling out candidates for judges in the background. He fills out a pink form. I seal the SCRAP OF PAPER in the envelope. He throws it all in a pile.
26. I am out of there - 9:30-ish. 30 people remain trying to fill out their self-drawn bingo cards.

No way my vote or any of the others in the room is being counted - ever. They say they have ten days to count the provisionals but the election was finally called on Thursday morning. My vote was meaningless. I love how everyone kept going through the motions as if they might matter.  Still, I will do it again next time. I am certain others will not.

How come election days are not work holidays?