(If you don't? You really should go find out.)

First!

Being first isn't about winning a race, nor is it about knowing something before anyone else. It isn't even about being first to attain something. (Ask all the people who just bought iPhone 4s...or a commenter getting ripped on 4chan.) Being first really means that your brand has the agility (balls) to be a trailblazer and take a chance on leveraging unique pop-culture and internet phenomenons before they expire.

Will some attempts fail? Absolutely. However, if you don't throw things against the wall? Nothing will stick. Thus, you need to take chances and try and capitalize on opportunities when they present themselves.

The MySpace problem

Don't worry Mr. Murdoch, if movies are any indication? MySpace is alive and well. Most Hollywood movies have a lengthy development time. A script has to be written, producers from a studio need to option said script, actors need to be cast, locations need to be chosen, film than must be shot... Typically, you're looking at a development cycle of 2-3 years (if you're lucky). Unfortunately for movie producers and their creators? The technology cycle does not. Thus, you end up with dated references, bizarre "hacking" shown on screen, and laughable usage of tech terms.

Creating a campaign or new marketing push for a brand is no different. However, marketers have the advantage of being able to churn out individual programs at a much faster rate than Hollywood and have them link into the brand program. So why don't more brands and marketers take advantage?

Planning for a Trend

The key to any agility based initiative is speed. Thus, in order to best take advantage of these relevant opportunities you need to have someone with their hand on the pulse of the internet (and thus pop culture). Short-tail gains added up can equal big revenue for a brand, especially if they are cost effective. Planning for these opportunities is the best way to take advantage. As counter intuitive as that statement might sound it's actually true.

Real-Time Execution

This is the hardest part. In fact, it's  damn near impossible. The larger the brand? The more approval processes and bureaucracy that you need to wade through.

W+K's Old Spice will be the standard that most creative directors and brands point to when describing how this could possibly be done. The trick here was that this actually came from a very traditional team (who were working with some very talented technologists). The tone, feel and identity of the Old Spice guy had been firmly established well before he even existed.

See video below:

Sound familiar?

What's Next?

Self awareness, casual asides and usage of references that border on ADHD. Get familiar with the term "meta". Quentin Tarantino, Family Guy and South Park have changed the way we approach and think about culture. (Although, I'm quite sure Family Guy does in fact use manatees.)

Remember, you can use this approach; but only if it actually is on brand and cohesive with the campaign you are running.

Anyone can make a video that has a chance of blowing up, but it takes a genius to make that video on behalf of an insurance company.

It's not about having the best (creative) idea.

Twelpforce: Participatory, saves money, and provides a creative solution. It's crowdsourcing done right.

It's getting the best idea to market (and effectively framing your message). In other words; the best business idea.
Great marketers tell stories. Constraints help shape them. Great stories break constraints.
Ouch. Makes your head hurt doesn't it? This is the current situation that marketers are dealing with. Now compound this with attention scarcity, a broadcast mentality and an afterthought on digital? You have one heck of a mess.

Stop trying to figure it out.

This short film from Johnnie Walker by all intents and purposes of traditional marketing shouldn't work. Yet it does (and it's beautiful to boot).

You should have only two qualifications for creating a marketing program: a) Is it useful? and b) Is it awesome?
If the answer to both those questions is yes? Congratulations, enjoy Cannes. (No seriously.)
Those two traits are at the heart of every great campaign, program and brand for the last one hundred years (and will be for the next one hundred years).

Defining Utility

This may save your life.

Utility needs to provide a direct tangible benefit to the consumer of your content. However, the key is providing valuable, useful marketing that doesn't want to make your consumer take a drill to their head to break up the boredom. Utility isn't so much about the medium as the end result.

Lower barriers to entry, providing brisk service and a solution that works all take precedence (not complete control mind you) over content style/creation. Sometimes, the most effective utility is as simple as an informative print ad. Utility is a true example of the ends needing to justify the business means.

Utility is essential. It won't truly take off though unless it's awesome.

Defining Awesome

If I have to describe why this is awesome to you? Get the hell off this blog. No, seriously.

What is "awesome"? It's a harder question than you might think. After all, we all have different interpretations of what it's made up of. Faris Yakob puts it better than anyone I've ever heard before in this summation:

"And technology isn't just about utility.
It can be about emotion - especially awe.
As I allude to above, the NYTimes has done a study of the most shared articles on their website and they all trigger awe - which makes sense because
AWE IS SOMETHING YOU WANT TO SHARE
Which is why it incumbent upon us to always be looking for the awesome."

Thus in order to want to share something; your content needs to be awesome. "Want" shouldn't be anywhere the equation; you need to share this content. Consumers don't share marketing with their friends because they care about brands, they share that information because they care about their friends.

All Shapes, All Sizes

Don't be constrained by medium though. In order to be effective you need to be able to think beyond mediums, length, constraints and anything else.

The Lord of the Rings trilogy has a run time of 558 minutes (683 minutes in the extended version). It also has the honor of being the most lucrative film trilogy of all time.

By your powers combined...

All marketing (that works) can be boiled down into awesomeness and utility. The key is figuring out to to combine the two in the most effective manner and how it directly relates to/satisfies your business objectives. How do you think marketing will evolve moving forward? Will it still adhere to these two tenets?

(Par-a-site) n. 1.  An organism that grows, feeds, and is sheltered on or in a different organism while contributing nothing to the survival of its host.

Fill a need. Position accordingly. Profit.

It's that simple. Parasites do this better then anyone. They fill holes in a product and in turn leverage that product's popularity to spur on their own development.

Why then do parasitic business models fail so often? After all, in the animal kingdom these creatures are the epitome of efficiency and survival. Granted they aren't the most loved...

Simple: They are at the mercy of their host. For an example of this, see the recent decision of Twitter to ban 3rd party ad platforms from their service.

Parasitic business models are a calculated risk. It often comes down to timing and the quality of product that you provide. Tweetie is a success story. Ad.ly is probably toast. They easily could have switched places.

Parasitic marketing on the other hand? Could not be  more successful  in the right hands (given that a proper code of conduct is observed). The key is co-opting an existent platform and adding additional information and functionality to it.

Filling a Niche

The best marketing solves a problem. Whether this problem is branding, positioning or business-related, it has to serve as a utility for pre-existing need in order to be valid.

Thus, you need to think more about what you can make first, and then concentrate on the emotion you can create. Then, building solutions to problems is far more effective.

Parasitic marketing isn't right for every situation. For example, you don't want to intercept and reshape a message. Nor do you want to deceive or mislead. However, you do want to provide valuable information or products where relevant and appropriate.

Crashing the Conversation

Twitter has popularized this phenomenon. Marketers often sit on key terms and relevant subjects to which they contribute. This phenomenon has also started happening on Facebook with the introduction of tagging various pages in individual posts.

Example:

The key isn't to crash, it's to listen, position and provide helpful, relevant information when needed. Most people are receptive to your message if you are filling a need. Thus, if you approach your marketing this way, you will be far more effective.

Augmented Reality: Ultimate Parasitic Marketing

Stickybits. Springpad. Foursquare. All represent the evolution of augmented reality, yet none could exist without the understanding that they were building upon pre-existing infrastructure. Twitter and Facebook are approaching Google-type importance. Thus, in order to leverage these services in the most efficient way possible, you need to connect to them via one of these 3rd party apps.

Augmented reality is just that. Reality with a helpful parasite gleaning information, context and chipping in helpful advice. It will be exciting to see what further developments occur over the next year.

A Helpful Parasite

Before engaging and actively seeking out platforms to augment, you need to ask yourself these five questions:

1. What are you adding to the conversation around the product?

2. Are you interrupting the natural sales cycle?

3. Are you respecting the rights of the community you are operating within and being a good citizen?

4. Do you have an open line of communication with your host/product?

5. Does your contribution/marketing make the original product better?

If your answer to any of these questions is in the negative? Stop what you are doing. You're spamming. It's a fine line, but you need to maintain it in order to be successful.

Parasitic marketing always needs to augment the platform/product, not detract from it.

Do you have some examples of marketing that could technically be termed "Augmented" or "Parasitic"? Share them below.

Photo Credit: Cousins West

Cognitive Biases - A Visual Study Guide by the Royal Society of Account Planning

Aspiring planners: Make flashcards out of this presentation.

I know I will be.

(from PSFK)

Want to confuse someone? Start talking about the importance of geotargeting, user profiles and predictive data modeling.

Now ask them if they’ve checked into Foursquare yet.

Geolocation is hot. As in, $150-million-dollars hot. Why shouldn’t it be? It blends mobile, contextual information, gaming and serendipity into a relevant experience, enabling users to change their behavior based on the actions of their friends (or enemies).

“Checking-in” isn’t just colloquial geek-speak; it’s the new human behavior.

Have you thought about the true intention of these tools?

Despite what detractors may say, Foursquare doesn’t exist to help burglars rob your house while you’re away (pleaserobme.com). Strangers probably don’t care about your exploits/check-ins. As marketers, however, we should be concerned with the aggregate data being collected and categorized around points on a map. How can we leverage it to our advantage? How is this information pertinent to your brand and objectives?

“Open by default” (meaning that information a user posts on a social site is, by default, available to the public) has led to the development and improvement of data collection, with Facebook and Google leading the way. We may have reached a critical mass of information, but at least now we can build predictive modeling around the data and market accordingly.

Foursquare, Gowalla, Loopt and Britekite have built context into locations and places that’s a gift to marketers. The world is now a physical Wikipedia entry. Data can be aggregated from everyone and extracted from everywhere.
Consumers may think that geolocation is a game, but for us it’s a new way to talk with consumers.

With both Google and the Library of Congress committed to archiving dialogue from social platforms, conversation is now part of the public forum for discussion. It’s also universally accessible, searchable and eternal—a huge shift for content formerly viewed as spontaneous and disposable.

With this mindset, we’ve begun to see the first forays into leveraging geolocation for brands. Local businesses in major metro areas like NYC and San Francisco are creating “Tips” (partnerships/deals with brands) that prompt a location-aware ad targeted directly at the individual. These special offers are opt-in and usually of high relevance to the user.

Brands are also sponsoring in-game rewards for users. For example, Bravo has created specific Foursquare badges based on their programming. Check into a restaurant featured on “Top Chef” and earn a badge.
But what if we aren’t thinking big enough? Marketers could purchase and bid on entire swaths of physical space to target consumers.

The auction model is the future of geolocation.

The model breaks down like this: Companies bid for “Check-ins” around various locations. Obviously some places will have higher values then others. Then services could charge the company for the ability to communicate with a customer at each individual check-in.

A potential execution of this strategy could be enacted by a chain restaurant. The restaurant could purchase the physical space within 2-3 square miles or it could just buy space within all other restaurants and prompt consumers to reconsider their purchase decision.

It’s the Google ad model as applied to physical space. Instead of keyword targeting, companies could begin location targeting and identifying the behavior of their core customer profile. Couple this with the recent developments at F8 (Facebook‘s developer conference) and you suddenly have a crystal clear picture of a potential consumer.

Predictive algorithms are nothing new. However, they have never been used quite this way. For instance, we already recommend restaurants based on affinity (consumer likes Restaurant X, therefore he will like Restaurant Y), but not necessarily on activity (consumer checks in at Whole Foods so he is directed to an organic bistro in his neighborhood). You can predict a stock's relative growth based on past activity, so why couldn’t you predict consumer behavior the same way?

Mobile accomplishes what was once thought impossible: it allows someone’s online identity to follow him or her around offline.

Services like Plancast, Meet Gatsby and Riotvine are utilizing the location-based web to go beyond real-time data and actually put some thought into contextualizing it. They’re taking static data and making it dynamic and predictive on an operational level. By self identifying interest in a particular event or subject consumers can be served information relevant to their future activities. In essence, marketers can now effectively target peer groups and influence a change in behavior via peer pressure.

This is just the beginning.

We keep gaining new information about ourselves and our surroundings every day. Augmented reality has become a key part of tech’s evolution; not just a footnote.

Who knows what the future will hold?

Photo Credit: adoptanegotiator

Video games used to be fairly straightforward: a world to save, a princess to rescue or finding a piece of fruit.

However, as consumers' tastes evolved? The games have kept pace and have exceeded the limits of what was thought to be  previously impossible.

Today's games are largely "sandbox" based meaning that they have a variety of different possible outcomes depending on what decisions you make in-game. In essence? Video games have started to emulate life; for every choice there is a consequence.

The Importance of Rules

The complexity and depth of these choices has exponentially expanded over the past decade. However, the choices that one can make in a game are finite (unlike life). If they weren't users would lose interest, become frustrated and abandon the experience.

Why?

Simple: It wouldn't be fun anymore.

Free will is hard (and it's too much like life). It relies on your imagination, competitive spirit and experiences to create your own idea of what you should be doing. Gaming allows for us to escape the reality of the unknown for the security of finite outcomes.

The fun comes in that simplicity. The user may not be able to control the outcome of their own life but in a game? The deck is stacked in their favor. Explore the limits, practice accordingly and push what is possible and you can't lose.

Marketer Takeaway: Providing a clear definition of your intentions allows you a greater deal of latitude when dealing with consumers. No one wants to be cheated. Thus you need to be transparent, open and honest about any engagement you have with the consumer.

Defining Your Objective

Every story ends and every game has a predetermined outcome. Sandbox games add a level of complexity on top of this by allowing for a variety of different outcomes.

This variable level of control and "free will" to choose your own path is essential to engaging and learning from the user. Games that are constantly under development like World of Warcraft often listen to player feedback and change outcomes and difficulties as a result.

In this way, game developers are able to fine tune the experience for the user and make it a more enjoyable experience.

Marketer Takeaway: Define your goals. What do you want to accomplish with this campaign? Who is your target audience? How can you make the best usage of your resources?

Using Breadcrumbs

Now that the rules have been established and objectives have been defined you need to set out a clear path for the user. This means leaving a variety of breadcrumbs at various points to help the user along and accomplish all the objectives that you set out for them.

The world doesn't come with a save-point. So why do developers create mission objectives and maps? To adjust for the skill level of the player.

Breadcrumbs decrease in value as users become familiar with the game. They remain important however because they provide an easy entry point for a newbie player.

Marketer Takeaway: Don't just cater to pre-defined influencers. Give people a low barrier for entry and allow them to adjust their advocacy accordingly. It's a lot easier to upload a picture then create a video. However, if a person has a great experience with your brand? They may engage with your brand at a higher level the next time around. Influencers tend to be fluid; not static.

Rewards and Incentives

What keeps 225 million people a month coming back to Zynga games? Social currency and a desire to achieve new incentives.

People love incentives no matter how small or large. The key is being able to scale these rewards incrementally and at a pace that is amenable to the player.

Marketer Takeaway: Given the choice between no carrot and a carrot? Always choose the carrot. Understand the competitive nature of people and utilize this in your messaging and outreach. You don't get something for nothing.

Have something else to add? I'd love to hear your thoughts on some other gaming mechanics that can be applied to marketing?

Photo Credit: kbcool

Advertisers make more money during the first broadcast of any event. They can charge more for the airtime on the assumption that they will have more viewers for that broadcast. Subsequent broadcasts and syndication lower the cost of entry for brands wishing to advertise.

This is the assumption that all media buys are negotiated off of. It was a great system, especially for the networks and it worked up until TiVo became a  household name.

Content on demand

Now? Behavior is shifting to the expectation that content should be available to anyone at any time (without advertising!). This has drastically reduced the value of a prime-time commercial. The expense no longer justifies the means; you have no assurance your commercial will even be seen in its entirety.

A survey of 1,000 U.S. consumers showed that more of us than ever before are choosing to watch TV shows on websites such as Hulu rather than on a TV. For younger folks, a full 83% said they watched some, most or all of their TV programming online.

This study, which was conducted by consumer electronics shopping site Retrevo, shows that the majority of Americans — 64%, according to the survey results — get at least some of their TV content online. Eight percent of the total said they watched most of their TV shows online, and 5% said they only watched television programs on the Internet.

For people under 25, almost a quarter of respondents said they watched most of their TV shows online, and 6% said they only watched TV online. ~Julie Odell, Mashable

As an internet user and someone who watches about 90% of their TV via Hulu why should I (or you) care? After all, most advertising is interruptive and annoying. (See said examples of me railing on traditional advertising here, here and here.)

No brands=No shows

Simple: Brands subsidize the cost of network broadcasts. No brands? No content. Unless you want to pay a premium for the service like HBO or Showtime.

Erosion of viewership is a reality. People will continue to expect that content be available and viewable at all times. How do you compensate for those shortcomings? Innovate and make the experience better for those watching TV during prime time.

The rise of co-viewing

How do you encourage viewers to tune in at an allotted time? Make it a participatory event.

How do you pull this off? Utilize external platforms and devices to augment the current viewing experience. It's all about creating maximum value; if I receive a better experience by watching an event live I'll likely return again on that assumption. It's simple human behavior.

For the moment, Twitter is the best tool to engage with others around a live event (see the massive success of BrandBowl). They've even launched a platform aimed at media to leverage their service and build on top of it. Touting the success of Twitter integration for "Bad Girls Club" on Oxygen may seem incredibly lame for some; it's gold for marketers though. Finally we have a way to bring viewers back to prime time.

What does the future look like?

Engagement will save advertising. It's just a matter of how fast and effectively we can integrate the improved experience for consumers. The beginnings of co-viewing programming are already beginning to take hold. DirectTV has a Twitter application, shows have dedicated hashtags, webisodes have found an audience and the inauguration was brought to us via Facebook AND CNN.

Now it's simply a matter of refining and perfecting the experience. The future looks awesome, as long as we remember the community experience is just important as the content.

Photo Credit: samchurchill

People are social creatures. It's inevitable that the technology we create serves to improve upon and augment our current behavior. One of the most interesting (and inevitable) uses of social technology is taking the search for a mate online.

It's big business.

Online dating has evolved from a cottage (and rather sketchy) industry to a $1.5+ billion industry. In fact,  it's a BIGGER industry than PORN. The MOBILE phone DATING market is worth $550 million. This number is expected to increase to $1.3 billion by 2013.¹

Staggering numbers aren't they? Although, they aren't that surprising given the amount of people on social networks today is rising everyday. The largest is Facebook with a user base of about 450 million.

"It's complicated."

One constant of Facebook has been the attention and bone of contention on one's relationship status on the site. Most relationships of the under 30-set aren't official until they have hit the Facebook newsfeed for all to see. It's with this mindset that Thread.com was designed.

What's Thread.com?

The premise of Thread is based on the (correct) assumption that most of us meet our significant others via our friends. Operating via Facebook Connect, Thread looks into your profile checks out your friend's friends and determines their relationship status. Relevant matches are then shown to you. If you find someone interesting, all you have to do is ask the friend who that person is connected to for an introduction.

Simple.

What makes an online dating site useful? Ease of use, relevance and success rate. Not much else to it. So, how does Thread.com rate?

1. Ease of use.

Thread is simple, straightforward and has one of the best UX entry points I've ever seen.

2. Bumper pool.

Safety is a primary concern of most daters. Thread.com eliminates that worry by pre-screening candidates that have been vetted by your friends. It also takes direct contact out of the initial equation and leaves that in the capable hands of the shared friend.

3. Serendipity

Thread serves as a simple introduction/icebreaker. It may be possible that you may know and/or be interested in some of the candidates already. This could also serve as a way to identify connections that you didn't know existed.

Bottom Line

How does Thread.com rate in terms of other dating sites? It doesn't. The functionality and programming around the site are to lightweight to compare it to a Match.com or Chemistry. However, it would be a fantastic augmentation for either.

This is just the beginning of applications being built off the framework of pre-existing social networks. As time goes on these applications will become more and more complex and the things that they are designed to do will become far more specialized. It will be interesting to see if Match.com or eHarmony acquires Thread in the short to near future or if they will launch their own applications to work within the same context.

Photo Credit: eyeliam

Is creation the pinnacle of achievement?

The success and failure of industry is based on this idea. Think about all that it takes to build something: an idea, a plan, people and resources to execute and the budget/organization to make sure it all happens. Once you have created said product you would either put it to use or sell it at a profit. Rinse. Repeat.

(You can see why most people go into software after you factor in the additional complexities of a brick and mortar.)

Seems simple enough, right? So why is it then that so many of our creations fail to succeed? It comes down to a basic understanding of what creation is and isn't.

Creation isn't static. It's a living, breathing organism that requires constant attention, care and love to succeed. Creativity is social.

The Seed

What are you actually creating? Are you creating a momentary distraction/interruption or something that has the potential to inspire?

We'd all like to inspire. The problem is most of us can't. That's why it's imperative to create something truly extraordinary to spur your marketing forward. Great content begets great reach.

Crowdsourcing is going to be baked into every single creative push going forward. How could it not be? It's cheap, sustainable and can build on and increase the power of your initial idea. The key is being able to effectively influence, understand and direct the creation of the product/marketing materials.

The new task for creation is simple but requires a fundamental paradigm shift: move to inspiring and inciting for activation instead of pure creation. The more customization and ability to tweak your content? The stickier the content will become.

Come up with a great idea. Create a model/demo.  Allow the crowd to execute and riff off of it. This is the future of the creative model. ~ The Creative Seed

Therefore, what level of social creativity are you building into your marketing? Social creativity is based on your original content's ability to inspire new content produced by your audience. Ideally, this user-generated content would serve to augment and strengthen the original creative concept.

Perennial or Annual?

Campaigns usually fall into one of two categories: a value prop (offer) or an introduction (branding). The difference between the two is not just in construction but also has to do with the sustainability of each.

Annual campaigns are limited and often used to increase the volume of sales in the short-term (usually unsustainable).

Example: Groupon, Launched in November 2008, Groupon features a daily deal on the best stuff to do, see, eat, and buy in a variety of cities across the United States. We have about 180 wonderful people working in our Chicago office (a handful of whom you can see to your right), along with a smattering of people in Groupon's other cities.

A perennial campaign is usually based on a pre-established concept meant to strengthen the overall structure and sustainability of the business. It reinforces core concepts and strengthens your brand.

Example: Staples' "Wow!" guy: Check out our newest commercial! When prices are this low, some people simply can't contain themselves.

The Fertilizer

Behavioral hooks are essential for any marketing. They ensure that your creation will be understood, appreciated and serve a purpose. Creating utility should be the first goal of product design but the second should be finding the behavior that cues the consumer to engage with said product.

Based on the above, wouldn't behavioral hooks essential for creativity? Behavior merely acts as an entrance into the psyche of the consumer who will be buying your product. It should be at the forefront of your mind when conceptualizing and designing content for your audience. Use psychology and behavior to craft your content in a way that is beneficial to your marketing. Try and make the choice to engage impulsive.

The Power of Perception

Let’s say you’re lying on a beach on a hot day. For the last hour you’ve been thinking about how much you want a nice cold bottle of your favorite beer. Your friend gets up to make a phone call and says,

“Hey, want a beer?”

The only place nearby where beer is sold is a run-down grocery store. How much money would you give your friend for the beer?

Remember how much you gave him and reread the question. This time around, replace “run-down grocery store” with “fancy hotel.” How much money would you give your friend now? Would it be more than before?

Most people say yes. During a research experiment, the behavior economist Richard Thaler discovered that the fancy resort’s median price was 71% higher than the run-down store’s price .

Amazing, right? You were willing to pay two drastically different prices for the same bottle of beer because your perception influenced your price limit. ~ Derek Halpern, Social Triggers

The Gardener

Who's curating and tending to your creation? Conversation strategy is just as important as creation. Without the proper influence and insight into which buttons to press and levers to pull content will fail.

Identifying and understanding the strengths and weaknesses of your influencers can determine the success or failure of a campaign. Thus, entrusting your content to the wrong voice will ensure its failure.

What to do? Identify your channels of distribution and your target influencers around the dialogue you will be using. Size, location and personality don't matter; context does. Use common sense.

"Wieden+Kennedy’s Coraline campaign is a textbook example of how to build buzz around a product using many different types of outreach.

Phase one was designed to activate online communities that have a reason to be passionate about this film in order to build a groundswell of support. Phase two was to create intrigue on a mass scale — introduce mysterious elements of the film that drive people to [the Coraline] website to learn more. Phase three was to create mass awareness for the film and it’s launch date.

In addition, W+K identified a guiding creative light for the campaign that “everything [they] do should reflect the unique, cool, handmade nature of this film. [They] believed that the more you knew about what went into it, the more you’d get out of it.” Though there are many aspects of the campaign that could be highlighted as examples of how to best do an outreach campaign, I’m going to focus specifically on their blogger outreach for this post." ~ Coraline Raises The Bar For Influencer Outreach; The Future of Ads

Serendipity

One of the more interesting innovations in the serendipity game is a service called Plancast. Pay close attention the genius of serendipity in this service's intended purpose:

Plancast is a website where people post their plans. Plans to attend a conference, plans to go to a party, perhaps plans to get a haircut. "We have the same 'who wants to share that?' issue as Twitter," Hendrickson told us today, "the standard 'I dont use Twitter because i don't care you're eating a sandwich.' What we've learned though is that semi-mundane stuff is actually interesting. So, perhaps we wont have a lot of the 'getting a haircut' stuff because that's indeed quite mundane, but we will get 'getting drinks tonight downtown' or 'heading to Palo Alto for the day' type stuff. Which actually leads to very cool serendipity."

Now that Twitter is such an unqualified success in all but monetization, it's cool to say you've got the same problems Twitter had.

Mash up all those plans from friends and you get an interesting stream of forthcoming events.

The site is simple, if smart, today. The little company has big plans for the future, though. "We want to host and distribute all content that pertains to what individuals, organizations and businesses have planned for the future," Hendrickson says. "If you break the idea of an 'event' down into its basic units (what's going to happen, when, and where), there's a ton of relevant social content through the long tail. We're designed to host a superset of all this event data." ~ Marshall Kirkpatrick; ReadWriteWeb. The Future as Platform: Mark Hendrickson's Vision for Plancast

Seeding never works 100% of the time. The best success rate that you can hope for is something with a 60% (I'm being generous) chance of gaining notoriety. Now factor in sales success based off of your launch/distribution strategy and you are left with a figure in the 33% range. Needless to say? It's a tough egg to crack.

The Harvest

Now that you've succeeded in bringing your campaign to fruition, what are its results? Have you been successful with your mission? More importantly, did the process deem itself worthy of repetition?

Learning and improved success comes from the measurement and dissection of a campaign. Always revisit your work to tweak, change or insert more creative horse power. After all marketing is a process.

Marketing doesn't stop at creation. It starts there.

Photo Credit: pagedooley, peterkaminski, gypsyfaephotography

What is originality?

Intellectual property and what it constitutes is an interesting discussion these days. What restrictions should be placed on ideas? Not the lawyer's definition, but the layman's. Most marketers are of the mindset that stealing is not only sanctioned but should be rewarded.

This shift in thinking did not come easily and has only been earned over the past decade. DMCA take down notices are still a fact of life and large corporations are still very resistant to anyone getting a hold of their content and manipulating it in a way out of their control.

Remix culture

Despite the best efforts of traditional avenues of control? The war is largely over.

"In reality, these companies lost control a long time ago; the fans can do pretty much anything they want with these brands and with a high level of visibility and going after them is a bit like Brier Rabbit pummeling away at the tar baby. Yet, even pretty innovative companies are getting trapped in the internal politics around television production and promotion, incapable of forming meaningful partnerships with their most active and visible fans, and thus almost certain to start acting in ways that are going to leave them, to continue the metaphor, looking “stuck up”. ~ Henry Jenkins, Going "Mad": Creating Fan Fiction 140 Characters at a Time

Creative ideas are being remixed, reformatted and bent to adhere to the current problem. It's hard to find a truly original idea. After all, we are exposed to so much information on a daily basis it's next to impossible not to take a little here and a little there as long as the outcome is different.

This can be especially true if the content is made readily available online and isn't protected.

Sharing is creation

This leads into an interesting discussion: What constitutes creativity?

Creation is simply adding your piece to the larger puzzle. If you participate in the elevation of an idea onto a new level you are just as much responsible for something's success then the originator of the content.

My only requirement for creation is this: An idea that independently or collectively that adds a new wrinkle to a pre-existing concept.

Seems simple doesn't it? The reality is that it isn't. Coming up with something that can provide utility and coolness in a new dimension is often harder than the creation of something new. Just ask anyone who has tried to make a sequel.

What's next?

Wikipedia is updated in real-time, songs are made public before the album is released, and advertisers are encouraging and embracing the concept of user generated content.  The time between creation and remix is continually getting shorter.

Then there are the new social consumers. Determined to take things into their own hands – conversing, commenting, criticizing, creating — they feel no qualms about bringing a brand down, celebrating the products they love, or becoming brands themselves, capable of building their own multi-million dollar companies with little more than a digital camera, a folding table and a knack for leveraging a community. ~ The Future of Advertising, Edward Boches

Is this a good thing? I happen to think so. After all, I'm of the mindset that any contribution to creation no matter how small should be rewarded.

Feel free to remix this post as well. (As long as you link to it!)

Photo Credit: pasukaru76