Digital Influence Mapping Project

Megatrends and the Glory of the Road

Will the shrinking credit market affect the VC market and exhuberance around Web 2.0? Never!

Anyhow, David Beisel at Venrock had an interesting post outlining Seven Ubertrends ripe for VC capital. Here are the first three and I encourage you to click through to see the rest:

"1. The digitalization of transportation experience. Our cars are transforming from motorized transportation into digital immersion experiences. With in-dash devices ranging from GPS, to satellite radio, to integrated telephone controllers, the place where many Americans spend much of their day is going digital. Also, other transportation experiences, namely public transportation, is being affected by a digitalization trend – everything from digital signage in subways to infomation touchscreens in taxis is modifying what we do when going from here to there.

2. Internet’s facilitation of green lifestyle. With concern over the environment becoming a progressively more relevant issue, the web provides a natural vehicle for connecting people to resources and services which lessen impact of individuals on environment. We are at the beginning of “The Green Web” which will provide individuals within our society a leveraged way to positively affect the planet.

3. Influence and word-of-mouth marketing facilitated by online social software. Marketers are increasingly concerned about truly engaging with consumers as the effectiveness of traditional advertising erodes. Social software (in its broadest sense) coupled with the principles of word-of-mouth marketing will provide for successfully reaching potential customers via the most trusted source – people they already know."

Idea Mini-Bar

The first point I find interesting as we have been poking around Sync - the voice activated mobile and MP3 control that is a joint venture between Microsoft and Ford - for a client. It's only natural that we would spend energy figuring out how to make use of our time traveling and especially commuting. I hope some equal energy is spent on making the road experience more glorious and fun via digital.

• What about a digital version of "I Spy" that would let cars traveling the same road participate as a community? "I spy something red near Exit 12...."

• Or a voice activated Yahoo Answers for a local community. Driving through, I could call a 1.800 humber and pose a question about the best diner in town with fresh pie. It gets converted to text, someone answers and it appears on my Google map mashup that is custom published for my trip.

• Or a traffic alert collective where everyone traveling on I95 through Maryland subscribes to a live channel that broadcasts traffic reports called in from the crowd.

I am all for seeing where travel innovations go to make us more productive during those lull moments we cannot control. But I don't want to lose the sense of adventure I get on road trips to the distractions of headphones and DVD consoles.

(image Heart Like a Wheel (2006)  from http://www.takehitoetani.com/hbbb.html)

Idea Bar #6: Brand Jingle Mashups

How do you take a classic brand who made their mark back before Johnny Quest and whose enduring brand "footprint" is a music jingle and make it relevant to a new, younger audience?

Think of "Oh, I wish I were an Oscar Mayer weiner...." or my personal favorite, the Good and Plenty song (actually qualifies as a "song" as it tells a complete story just the way Johnny Cash would).

I know - boomer crap. Still, these musical phantoms linger in the ether around us just waiting to be resurrected. Most ad agencies would re-introduce them through new television advertising.

What if you orchestrated them a dozen different ways and then unleashed them on the growing music mash-up universe. Users could layer them into new creations, trade the music elements, create their own and get some instant recognition for their work. Dozens of different genres of  "Oh, I wish I were an Oscar Meyer weiner...." would pop up with hip hop back beats, electronica wavers, rock and roll drum solos.

Promote the activity within existing social networks (e.g. My Space, Facebook, Bebo), influential bloggers, and even via partnerships with relevant sites (e.g. www.splicemusic.com ). And construct gallery pages to return well in major search engines along with the third party content. 

To drive uptake and mashup creation, we can hold a contest that allows for both judged winners and people’s choice winners. Much like users voted during the recent Slideshare competition, particpants can vote their favorites up and down. That leads to the people’s choice. Meanwhile, we can enlist judges from the mashup community (and who have credibility) such as Thaumata from splicemusic or DJ ZTrip or DJ Spooky.

These judges are celebrities in the world of mashup music and would add a draw to the competition.

Let’s give our users the jingle outright. Let’s allow them to make it their own. Just as teens and young adults rediscover their parents’ music and mash it up or otherwise make it their own, they can do the same with jingles. This is about co-creation NOT about adopting the vernacular of social media to “market.”

Will they butcher the brand? You betcha. That's a good thing because they will make it their own.

Idea Mini Bar #3: Band Tour RSS

This easily falls into the "this must have been done everywhere but I can't find it" category. There are about 6-8 bands that I am sufficiently in love with that I want to see them when they come within 60 miles of DC. I won't tell you them all but just to give you some idea:

• Grinderman (or the Bad Seeds whichever tours US first)
• Social Distortion (yes, they are back on the road and already have some East Coast dates)
• Drive-by Truckers (never seen them but they are supposed to be a great show)
• Thirsty Merc (touring their Australian homeland at the moment)

There are at least four more.

Why can't I just subscribe to their tour RSS feed? Why do I have to check their Web sites every so often to try and catch when new dates appear? I am a fan. Make it easy for me to show up and spread the word.

Anyhow, it's hard to believe that My Space doesn't have the RSS tour feed thing built in. Aren't I on fan email alerts you ask? Yes and no. The "yes" - I am on some band's email lists but it clutters up my Inbox. My feed reader is the place to be. The "no" - I have been dropped by the Social Distortion email list. I know because my wife still gets email but I do not. If it were a RSS feed, I would have known immediately if there was some technical problem.

Could this be done by Tickets.com or Ticketmaster? No. Unfortunately with their ticket pricing practices, these guys are one level below the cable company in terms of credibility, trust and so forth. More and more bands are ticketing outside these 600-lb gorillas, that I would prefer to hear from the band, itself.

Some labels are doing it. Here is the RSS Feed for Sonic Youth. But you don't need Geffen Records to provide an RSS feed.

Hook me up, baby.

Idea Mini Bar #2: Flickr Fashion Slideshows

It's always great to see how different people use the tools in really useful ways. Mai has just started a blog that captures and comments on street fashion in SF (thanks to Awesome which is...awesome). But it is Mai's Flickr account where the magic happens. If you worked for a fashion company, retailer, or maybe an ad agency, why not set up Flickr slideshows to play on your hallway computer displays (if you have them - we do). And as you might guess, Mia has some company out there with many people posting snaps they take on the street of fashion - mostly youth.

Do you need an expensive trendwatcher to offer reports of what folks are wearing out there? Only if they offer insight along with it.

Set up your in-office flatscreens that usually cycle the work created by the agency/company for outside visitors to display slideshows from these Flickr feeds. These internal screens will spark conversation inside the company and demonstrate something more to visitors - that you look outward, not inward.

Idea Mini Bar #1: ColbertNation Flag

This is a mini-bar idea. Seemed so obvious at the time so I didn't mention it but then I Googled a bit and found no one taking up the flag, so-to-speak.

Stephen Colbert challenged his Antarctic viewer, Michael Rehm, to design and plant a flag in Antarctica on his behalf. This coming from the guy who produced great green screen clips of himself weilding a light saber so that his fans could do a mash-up.

We should all be challenged to create the ColbertNation flag, post our designs on Flickr, allow Digg-style voting, even encourage different designers to do a mash-up of sorts. Clearly Colbert has developed a community of fans. They get some of their sustenance at CobertNation.com. There is plenty of 'social" activity there which is great. But here is a perfect group activity to get viewers/community members engaged, generate some sustained word of mouth over time and create a cool flag. 

Sometimes small opportunities arise to get social. While I am huge proponent of creating a thoughtful strategy, sometime you just have to go with it.

maybe if we all just started uploading our flags and tags to a Flickr page....

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.

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.

Idea Bar #4: College Vlog Tours

The biggest criteria for choosing college X over college Y is the campus tour. Ultimately, students want to see what it is really like to live in West Philadelphia (UPenn) or on the campus of Pratt Institute in Brooklyn before commiting their parent's hard-earned money. The tour gives you a sense of the space - geography, climate, architecture, etc...- and to a lesser extent, a sense of place - what it is like to live, study and work there.

What if some brave university tried to extend the experience of being at school, not through some tricky IPIX-like panoramic photography or otherwise highly technical virtual experience but through a cluster of video blog entries from students themselves? Let's create the School of Vlog Project. (credit to Alison, who came up with most of this idea).

Here's how it works:

Pratt Institute (my guniea pig school 'cause I used to live in Fort Greene) invites a vlogging training group like Node101 to campus in the Fall just when students are coming back.

They recruit a collection of different students who are willing to document their experience on campus and in the neighborhood to the tune of say a handful of videos. There are guidelines about what is okay to cover and what is best to leave for your personal blog. The challenge is to document their POV on the campus experience in a way that will give new recruits an insightful view. The SOV team can be a mix of returning students and newbies to get a mix of perspectives.

This team would be outfitted with video equipment, given some work-study status, whatever it takes to make it easier for them to do their "job". I would venture a guess that many students would arrive motivated for this.

The videos would be posted online in some growing gallery that stitched them together in a single interface - possible a Google Maps/Earth mashup.

These videos - little documentaries - would go a long way to revealing what it is really like to live in Ft. Greene Brooklyn at one of the top art schools in NYC. With the guidance of a group like Node 101, these videos would truly tella story that is personal and revealing.

As colleges dip deeper into their waiting lists for the quality candidates they want, we will see them increasingly adopt competitive marketing techniques to win those candidates over.  Sure, Pratt hosts some videos presumably made by students as expressions of their artistic intent. (They also have some Web1.0 QTVRs) Let's expand and focus our storytelling efforts to create a gallery worth of video povs to give new students a real taste of campus life.

Who will take up this challenge?

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Idea Bar #3: Social Museums

When I lived in NYC, the Museum of Modern Art had a late night - Thursday's, I think - that was well known as a type of pick-up gig. That's not what I mean by Social Museums.

Ever go to a museum and not know where to start? I tend to just wander around and actually cannot stay inside a museum for more than about an hour to an hour and a half. I am not likely to take an official tour. I love art and history and science but the only great audio tour I ever took was at Eastern State Penitentiary narrated by Steve Buscemi. (it was full of stories vs. simple facts) What I would love to do is follow a path to see things someone recommends.

Likewise, I love the Philadelphia Museum of Art. I am a fan. I am drawn to the great Marcel Duchamp collection and all those great guys and gals that came after Cezanne. I could take you on a great surgical strike tour of that Museum.

What if museums encouraged vloggers to create their own quick tours of the museum and posted them online for visitors to view. You would hear a personal point of view about why Nude Descending the Staircase is so pivotal and why you shouldn't let your 6-year-old look through that little peep-hole installation in the Duchamp exhibit. The Museum could collect online galleries of these tours and encourage a league of enthusiasts to guide others to what they find special about the experience (not just the exhibits).

Hurdle #1: many museums don't allow photography. Some just don't allow flash photography. The former is probably about copyright protection. Who wants anyone infringing on the revenue of museum store sales of coffee table books and postcards? Not me. But with an average video camera recording at 72 dpi (300 dpi or better needed for quality print production), is that really a risk?

Hurdle #2: the cacophony of vloggers self-narrating while they stand in front of Water Lillies would disturb the other visitors. I would argue that the screaming kids do more harm there. So, hold special hours for vloggers. That could be part of th epromotion that ought to go into creating the new Social Museum.

Hurdle #3: the culture of "experts" suggest that only curators or the surviving spouses of artists can lead people. Time for a new museum culture.

These can all be overcome. Allowing vloggers to create video tours would engage a group of museum fans to own a piece of that experience and share it with others. It would break down the formality of the museum experience without disturbing the quality. It would introduce new relevance to museum-goers and energize a new generation of enthusiasts.

The Philadelphia Museum of Art is already doing some interesting things like adding RSS feeds to their site and offering podcasts like this one from curator Kathy Foster on the Andrew Wyeth exhibition. And many have video. But I have seen no examples yet of vloggers who give their favorite "tours" of a museum.

Which museum will take me up on this? I offer to become the first vlogger. Come on Philly.

Idea Bar #2: Tupperware

Truth be told this Idea Bar idea could work well for either Rubbermaid or Tupperware. Then I saw the Translations in Tupperware contest (think Red Bull can contest) and I realized that I better give this one to them before they go too far with the Tupperware dresses and so forth.

Become the champion of potluck dinners.

There is a vibrant energy across the country behind potlucks. Add to that the other variety of group dinners where participants bring food (i.e. most Thanksgivings) and there is already a substantial "movement" underway. A keyword search on Technorati brings in about 50K hits. In Yahoo Groups? 700! Go on Flickr and you can browse through pages and pages of photos of different potluck events.

What if Tupperware built a Web site that made it easy for people to plan and invite friends and family to group meals and potlucks. The site would have simple group invitation functionality and also potluck-specific functions that make it easy to designate dishes (no one wants 12 bowls of mashed potatoes). By facilitating these dinners, Tupperware becomes a true helper in a very real social phenomena. Poltluckers could share recipes and event ideas and grow their very personal and local gathering into something that connects with groups across the globe. People would act locally yet truly be part of a larger movement. Of course there could be all sorts of stunts (e.g. everyone signs up to have a potluck on Thursday, September 12 at 8pm - potlucks across the globe!)

Participants would share pictures and video of their own potlucks and even create profiles of their events (here come the My Space pages). Don't laugh about the video and pictures - it's already happening.

Tupperware has great emotional equity. And they could re-insert themselves in our contemporary lives through potlucks. Does everyone do potlucks? Of course not. But Tupperware would position themselves as the brand that facilitates group meals and the giving of food. Suddenly, their functional role and emotional place intersect. It's a bit different than the contest they are currently running which encourages users to make things out of Tupperware - a celebration of the company vs. the people who use the product.