Experience Manifesto

YouTube - Lady Gaga - Poker Face (Level 01)

Just came across this game concept on youtube and thought that it was pretty cool. You actually do have to pay attention to the videos to score and move to the next level. It would certainly get me to watch more videos and it's the first program I've seen like this, I'm sure it won't be the last!

Everyone loves music videos. Artistry, vision, choreography, music. But are you really watching? Stop, pay close attention and find out for yourself. 15 Levels, 15 Challenges, and it gets tricky.

Presenting the first ever interactive music video challenge. With the latest and most popular videos from Lady Gaga, Soulja Boy, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and more, "Don't Miss A Beat" tests your attention to detail one music video at a time. So ask yourself again, are you really watching?The Game Starts Here:

YouTube - Lady Gaga - Poker Face (Level 01).

BRITE 09, The Future of Media and the Prospects for Brands

Avner Ronen, CEO of Boxee is the next speaker here at BRITE.  I actually have a Boxee account, but I have to admit, I haven't really used it yet.  Maybe later tonight I'll get online and get it working for me.  Boxee does some very cool things with content management and updates my status in other places, like myspace or Twitter.  They've also done a partnership with Netflix, as well as MTV and others.  Really great content management system for video, music, photos, but does things beyond that as well.  They've created some of the social tools, so people can recommend content for you, etc.

boxee: the open, connected, social media center for mac os x and linux.

Could This Be the Problem?

I was looking at how people come to the blog and someone did a search at Ask.com for "brand experience Lab." So, I went to the site to see what I saw and the screen grab is below. You won't see the result for the actual search, because there's a half page of sponsored results first. And two of the results involve lab clothing. The second picture is the google results of the same search. Maybe this is why ask.com doesn't get ahead of google?

Microsoft offers $44.6 billion for Yahoo - U.S. business- msnbc.com

Big news from the business world. It was announced less then an hour ago and could have some real impact for the online world. They must have been pretty tight lipped about this offer, I was at Microsoft yesterday for an in-house meeting for msnbc.com and there was no buzz about this at all. Let's see what happens next!

Microsoft Corp. is offering $44.6 billion in cash and stock for search engine operator Yahoo Inc. in a move to boost its competitive position in the online services market.

The unexpected announcement Friday comes as Microsoft, the world's biggest software company, seeks new ways to compete more effectively against the search and online advertising powerhouse Google Inc.

Link: Microsoft offers $44.6 billion for Yahoo - U.S. business- msnbc.com.

Technorati Glitch, But Hey, But I'm Ranked #1 Today!

I got a post from Roger Anderson alerting the authors of the Age of Conversation that he hit #1 according to the Technorati listings. Well, several of us have checked our ranking and don't you know if we didn't turn up as #1 too! So, althought it's surely a glitch of some kind, I will relish the fact that for one, potentially brief, moment in time, I had a #1 ranking on Technorati!

Link: Modern Magellans makes Technorati #1.

Jaffe Juice: Bloggers v Bloggers (your comments welcome)

This is one of the stories that bloggers have been talking about the past few days and I've been catching up on all of the threads tonight. There's also been some discussions about the Nikon D80 blogger give away (full disclosure, I wasn't one of the blogger who received a D80 and I'm pretty bummed about it! Damn, what do I need to do to get on these lists???) and how it should be played in the blogosphere. But these kind of stories continue to raise issues about the rules and working of blogs and how, if at all, they should fit into the traditional world of main stream media.

So, let's start with what happened with Deborah Weil and the alliConnect blog. It seems that they weren't getting enough comments on the site and Debbie Weil was hired by GSK (more disclosure, we've worked with GSK in the past and I'm kinda' bummed they didn't call us about this!) to help boost the conversation. So, here's what Debbie sent out to bloggers show knew:

Hi everyone,

This is a shameless request. I'm working with GlaxoSmithKline on the official corporate blog for alli, the first FDA-approved, OTC weight loss product. You may have seen the TV ads.

While traffic to the blog is growing, readers seem shy about leaving Comments.

You can help jump start the two-way conversation! Take a peek at the blog at http://www.alliconnect.com.

If you're inspired or provoked, leave a comment on any entry. No need to say that you know me, of course. (Emphasis mine, DBP)

It really is kind of neat that a Global 100 company is doing a blog like this. It's not easy.

Now, I send out stories from our blog to other bloggers to both increase the conversation and increase traffic, so that by itself is not really all that unusual. But, there are two things that do make it a little unusual.

1. Asking people to post comments on a client blog, especially when they may or may not have any relation to the product. So, when I send out something to fellow bloggers, I know that their POV will be of interest to my readers. And I do really want a conversation, so whether or not people agree with me is not as important to me as having a good dialogue. But, unless I'm trying to lose weight or I'm using Alli, then what's my credibility to comment on the blog? And what's the value of comments when they have no value to the blog? I have to turn on comment authentication every few months just to stop blog spam. Wasn't Debbie in fact, inviting blog spam?
2. But the thing that seemed to get people really upset was when she said No need to say that you know me, of course. I don't understand why Debbie would've even mentioned that, it just creates the wrong perception of what she was trying to do.

Debbie posts her side of the story here, but I think she's missed the two important above. It's OK to send a note saying Hey, take a look at what I've written and post your thoughts, but that's not really what she asked people to do. She didn't ask fellow bloggers to critique the blog and give her ideas for improvement. She asked people to post comments on the blog as if they were actually commenting on the effectiveness of Alli.

With Nikon, they gave the D80 to a bunch of bloggers and really didn't ask them to do anything is return. They were clearly hoping to get bloggers to do posts both about the camera and with the camera. You may remember that Microsoft faced some controversy earlier this year when they sent some high end laptops loaded with Vista to blogger to get them to write about Vista.

As with the Alli blog above, the issue always seems to come back to transparency. If you disclose that you've received the product for review and then you review it, hey, that's OK. It's only when you don't disclose the potential relationship that trouble can start. On the other hand, brands have used celebrity spokespeople for years and most times we didn’t believe they actually used the product. Is it OK for bloggers to do the same thing?

But, to stir the pot just a little, there's an interesting thing happening in the blogosphere. There seems to be a fluid set of rules and, many people saying there shouldn't be rules at all. Hey, it's the internet, man! But let me ask this question -- what's so new about blogs? Is it just that they're instant and global? Is there really something fundamentally different that blogs do then what was available PB (pre-blog)?

We like to talk about how much better we are then MSM, but we don't want to have to play by their rules and that's not really fair, is it? If MSM have rules about how they handle review samples, then why don't they apply to bloggers as well? If disclosure is necessary for MSM, then shouldn't it be required of bloggers? Why do we need a new set of rules just because we're bloggers?

Now, I never seem to be able to get people to comment here no matter what I do, so let's see if this post gets some dialogue going. Should there be a different set of rules for bloggers and MSM? What's the real role of transparency in media? And what about Naomi? Extra points if you know where that reference is from!

Looking forward to hearing your thoughts!

Link: BlogWrite for CEOs: Using the backchannel of email to invite Comments on your blog.

Link: Jaffe Juice: Bloggers v Bloggers (your comments welcome).

Link: Blogging: Who Makes Up the Rules?.

Micro Persuasion: Open Letter: A Lesson Learned Twittering

Instead of being totally absorbed in Lost, I got caught up in yet another online dust-up in he blogosphere. This time, I guess it started when Steve Rubel from Edelman Twittered PC Mag is another. I have a free sub but it goes in the trash. And that posting lead Jim Louderback, Editor-in-Chief of PC Magazine, to question how seriously he should take pitches from a PR company after one of their top executives admits he just throws out the magazine. As you might have read here before, I don't always agree with Steve (Experience Manifesto: Advertising Age - You Might as Well Be Searching for Bigfoot), but in this case, he said something, someone disagreed and he apologized.

But, you have to read through the comments on Steve Rubel's post to get some really good chuckles. I just love the experts who can't wait to bring Jim Louderback to task for being upset. And while Steve Rubel, in his apology, indicated that he reads PC Mag online and through RSS feeds, he doesn't mention that in his Twitter post. Yet many people attack Jim because he's another big media company upset that people don't want to read the magazine instead of reading it online. But that's not what Rubel said. He didn't say "I don't read the magazine, but I do read it online." He simply said he throws the magazine out.

But people needed to comment on the whole new world bullshit that's probably been around since the beginning of time. Everyone thinks it's a new world. But being rude doesn't change just because you're using a new communications tool. In fact, while reading through the comments, it's clear that folks who like to trumpet the brave new world, carry on just like the middle school kids calling each other names when I was a kid. No brave new world, just a new way to behave childishly.

Hey, gotta’ take a break and re-watch Lost because I think I missed some important items. I might try to get back to this later, but I think you get my point. New communication tools don’t change how we need to behave!

The following is an open letter to Jim Louderback, Editor-in-Chief of PC Magazine, as well as any of the several hundred employees who work for Ziff Davis Media.

Dear Mr. Louderback,

Last Friday, yes Friday the 13th, I put up a post on Twitter that I wish I hadn’t. I said that I don’t read the hard copy of PC Magazine and that my free subscription goes in the trash. In a guest editorial on Strumpette you weighed whether the magazine in response should blacklist all PR pitches from Edelman, my employer, on behalf of our tech clients.

I learned a valuable lesson. Post too fast without providing context and it can elicit an unintended response. While the item is true, it does not reflect my full media consumption habits. I subscribe to PC Mag RSS feeds and have linked to several of your publication's online articles over the three years I have been writing this blog. Further, I have linked to articles from eWeek, your sister site.

Link: Micro Persuasion: Open Letter: A Lesson Learned Twittering.

Link: EXCLUSIVE: PC Magazine Considers Edelman Boycott.

Mini-blog is the talk of Silicon Valley - Financial Times - MSNBC.com

I ran across Twitter a few months ago and frankly, didn't really get into it. Sometimes these things grab me, sometimes they don't and this didn't. But lots of folks have been talking about it on blogs and it's really gotten some enthusiastic comments. They actually seem to be having problems with their site today, so although I’ve signed up, I haven’t been able to do much. The problem with things like this is that they actually take some effort to keep updating everything and with my ADD, I get started on things and then fade away. So, we’ll see how I do on Twitter. More to come!

Silicon Valley is abuzz over a new mini-blogging service for mobile phones that some predict will be a mass-market hit with the reach of a YouTube or MySpace.

Over the past two weeks, Twitter has attracted the sort of hyperbole the Valley reserves for its next internet darling – though such self-reinforcing adulationalso led to dotcom mania.

Users of Twitter post short messages – up to 140 characters – that can be viewed either on a website or on mobile phones. "Twitter probably wouldn't have existed before blogging, when people learned to be more transparent," Mr Mayfield added.

Link: Mini-blog is the talk of Silicon Valley - Financial Times - MSNBC.com.

Link: Twitter: What are you doing?.

Link: SXSW Showdown: Dodgeball Vs. Twitter.

Link: Twitter (kottke.org).

Link: Twitter : tins ::: Rick Klau’s weblog.

From Cyberloser to Social Magnet: FakeMySpace | Marketing Profs Daily Fix Blog

You know that this kind of thing was bound to happen, people helping you create fake friends so that you can appear more popular on myspace. The site is actually down right now, as they seemed to have run into some legal issues with the photos of models they were using. But I'm sure that this won't be the only attempt at helping people create fake friends for myspace. I guess we had imaginary friends when I was a kid, so maybe there's really nothing wrong with with having imaginary friends on myspace. Here's what CK had to say about fakeyourspace:

On the one hand I’m aghast; on the other I’m a bit intrigued. For those of you not familiar with the finer points of MySpace, the social-networking site allows you to approve “friends” in your network so you can communicate back and forth and, in turn, meet even more friends. And for many, the amount of friends one has equals how important you are. So it is both sad—and yet, from a pure business standpoint, sort of savvy—that a new site lets you rent “friends.”

Link: From Cyberloser to Social Magnet: FakeMySpace | Marketing Profs Daily Fix Blog.

Link: FakeYourSpace Launches - Buy Sexy MySpace Friends .

Link: FakeYourSpace: How Losers Become Popular at The Blog Herald.

Advertising Age - Digital - Why Joost Isn't Just Your Average 'YouTube Killer'

I've just become a beta tester for Joost, so I'll be able to update my experiences to the blog. They have a seriously good pedigree behind then, having started both Kazaa and Skype prior to creating Joost. The download was surprisingly simple — it took me about 3 minutes to be up & running. I’ve been having some problems with my laptop running very slowly, so I’ll have to figure that out to really enjoying watching. But, it looks great and so far, it’s been pretty simple to use.

I’m watching my first show on the IndieFlix Premiere Hits network and, while I think the show is dragging, it’s working well. On longer pieces like the one I’m watching, you do get commercial breaks during the program, and the first one took me a few seconds before I realized that I had left the show. Once I understood the pattern, it didn’t really bother me at all. They don’t have a lot of programming yet — although I am watching Rocky & Bullwinkle now — but they’re working on a number of content deals that will make this format really work. It could also use some more descriptions of the channels, right now you kinda’ have to guess at some of them. But these will be minor squabbles in the future.

Looking forward to exploring Joost more.

You get home from a long day at work, flop down on the couch, crack open a cold lager and flip on the TV. Clicking through your own personal programming guide -- no more having to scroll past endless movie channels or cooking networks you've never watched -- you settle on a surfing show. A massive wave forms and you shoot your brother an instant message: "watch this." He clicks on it and instantly is synced with the program you're watching.

Here's the catch: the video stream isn't coming from Comcast or DirecTV, it's coming from Joost, one of the latest entrants into the online video market -- and a service for which the cliche "YouTube killer" has been commonly applied. But it's more likely to become a cable-company killer. While YouTube has become a repository for Long Tail user-generated content, Joost is looking to distribute professionally created content.

Link: Advertising Age - Digital - Why Joost Isn't Just Your Average 'YouTube Killer'.

Link: Kazaa’s Creators Do Latest Venture by the Book - New York Times.