I grew up thinking of journalism as a profession that served a high, noble purpose: the pursuit of truth, and knowledge, and making the world a better place. But Peretti rightly nails a disturbing fact about the “post-journalism” world of web publishing: if maximizing traffic is your primary goal, you’ll be more successful if you instead focus on feeding the dark beasts of human id. How to engineer a viral web hit: just add “Mormons, Mullets or Maniacs” (via seanbonnermikehudack)
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Tamu Townsend, a 37-year-old technical writer in Montreal, said she regularly received [Facebook] prompts to connect with acquaintances and friends who had died. “Sometimes it’s quite comforting when their faces show up,” Ms. Townsend said. “But at some point it doesn’t become comforting to see that. The service is telling you to reconnect with someone you can’t. If it’s someone that has passed away recently enough, it smarts. As Older Users Join Facebook, Network Grapples With Death - NYTimes.com (via rickwebb)
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We are living through a similar explosion of publishing capability today, where digital media link over a billion people into the same network. This linking together in turn lets us tap our cognitive surplus, the trillion hours a year of free time the educated population of the planet has to spend doing things they care about. In the 20th century, the bulk of that time was spent watching television, but our cognitive surplus is so enormous that diverting even a tiny fraction of time from consumption to participation can create enormous positive effects.

Wikipedia took the idea of peer review and applied it to volunteers on a global scale, becoming the most important English reference work in less than 10 years. Yet the cumulative time devoted to creating Wikipedia, something like 100 million hours of human thought, is expended by Americans every weekend, just watching ads. It only takes a fractional shift in the direction of participation to create remarkable new educational resources.

From this brilliant WSJ piece by Clay Shirky.

This is pretty awesome: BMW creates Asia’s first interactive 3D building projection.

The emergence of a new media system is typified by a period of transposition, where the behavioural grammar of the previous system remains dominant. The first television shows were radio shows with people talking directly into camera. The first films were stageplays that had been filmed. And the first marketing forays online took what we knew about media and branding from broadcast media and applied it to a whole new space.

But digital is different. Digital is not a channel. It’s a suite of platforms, channels and tactics that will, ultimately subsume its parents entirely. Digital marketing is not simply a new place to disperse persuasive symbols, but the emergence of any entirely new behavioural grammar, as companies and their customer begin to engage with each other in entirely new ways in entirely new spaces, where everyone has an equal voice.

From this MUST READ post by Faris, ”A decade of digital: 10 things for 2010”
The days of you having a different image for your work friends or co-workers and for the other people you know are probably coming to an end pretty quickly… Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity. Mark Zuckerberg via Tomorrow Museum (via somethingchanged)
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More than a million people, most of them from the United States, clog Chatroulette’s servers daily. To “next” someone has become a common transitive verb. Catman is an Internet celebrity, as is Merton the improvising pianist. Brooklyn bars throw Chatroulette parties, an indie band has used the site to début an album, and the Texas attorney general has warned parents to keep their children far, far away. Hundreds of articles and blog posts have asked whether Chatroulette is a fad or a good investment, and if it will change Internet culture forever. From this excellent New Yorker article by Julia Ioffe.
via Mal Bonnington
We’re looking for a Digital Strategist - come join our team!

dtdigital:

We need a Digital Strategist with a strong social media focus to join DTDigital / Ogilvy Melbourne’s rapidly growing team. This is an opportunity to play a key role in building the best social media team in town.

We have a track record of award-winning digital work dating back to 1996, and over the years have created an awesome culture and an unbeatable client list (were talkin Honda, Myer, NAB, Bunnings, Sensis, Football Australia and Fosters, just to name a few).

Day-to-day, you will be responsible for:

  • Monitoring and analysing key topics of conversation about our clients brands
  • Advising clients on how they can best approach engaging their audiences through social media
  • Collaborating with creative agency teams on developing integrated campaigns
  • Identifying and converting new business opportunities
  • Running social media training sessions for clients

You have:

  • A deep understanding of how real people use the internet in their daily lives
  • A strong personal presence on key social networks
  • Proven ability to work independently to deadlines and budgets
  • Exceptional verbal and written communication skills
  • A love for collaborative problem solving (and mad lolz!)
  • Ability to confidently present ideas and strategies to senior-level clients
  • Relevant degree-level tertiary qualification(s)

Obviously a PR background would be highly advantageous, as would experience working in a digital, creative or media agency environment.

If you display some or all of the symptoms above, then send a brief cover letter and CV to alex.campbell AT ogilvy.com.au

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Age groups across social networking sites (via Michael Lebowitz)

Age groups across social networking sites (via Michael Lebowitz)

Beautiful work from Goodby Silverstein for Tostitos.

What’s cool and what’s not for brand managers

Cool

  • Creating and publishing content that people genuinely love (Ray-Ban, Johnnie Walker)
  • Helping bring people together in interesting ways (Bendigo Bank, Football Australia)
  • Doing crazy shit that makes people laugh or intrigued (Volkswagen, Toyota)
  • Websites that actually do useful stuff for people (Nike)
  • Being aware of and connected to what’s going on in popular culture (MYER)
  • Having a real, distinctive, human personality (Steinlager)

Not cool

  • Assuming that anyone is interested in what you have to say about your brand
  • Trying to communicate your message before you’ve earned your audience’s attention
  • Assuming that the people who watch or engage with your ads are stupid
  • Taking away privacy and not at least giving relevance back in return
  • Letting your advertising agency setup a Facebook page for your campaign because “social media is important”
  • Not actually using the media that you’re making decisions about
  • Advertising that interrupts or annoys people in any way

Inspired by Jessica’s post a few weeks ago.

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Andy sent me a link to Flattr last week. It’s a service that is setting out to revolutionise how people get paid for online content. I’m always pretty suspicious of any startup that claims they are going to ‘revolutionise’ something, but it’s an interesting idea. These were my initial thoughts:

I love the (generally) uncommercial nature of blogs at the moment, and I wonder how this would change people’s behaviour for the worse. I know that I’d get way more donations for posting “10 steps to becoming a power blogger” or uploading a photo with a stupid caption on it in Helvetica, rather than writing something interesting about how people use the internet or what I’m thinking about life. I’d probably rather not have this in the back of my mind when I’m thinking about what to write on, and I’d definitely rather not read blogs for people who are motivated this way.

When I see that bloggers are doing ‘sponsored’ posts or taking money from people like Nuffnang, they immediately lose all credibility in my mind. If we can find time to blog for free just because we enjoy doing it then everyone else can too.

Not sure about the writing and art direction in the explanation video though!