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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.

gautamramdurai:

“The Internet Hates Ads”

Nicolas Roope from POKE talks about “things vs ads” (via upside)

reblogged from gautamramdurai

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!

This is quite lovely.

somethingchanged:

Google Parisian Love 2010 Super Bowl XLIV Commercial Ad HD (via TheUltimateMultiTV) Awwww.

reblogged from somethingchanged

wearethedigitalkids:

woodlandcreature:

Remember when Facebook was called Thefacebook and looked like this? I can’t believe I’ve been on it for almost six years, since summer 2004.

(via mknell : arig)

reblogged from wearethedigitalkids

In Web 2.0 jargon the words “friend” and “community” are severely abused. Unless a brand has a cult following, there’s no “community” around the brand, just customers and prospects. And unless you can call on your friends in a time of need, and they you, they’re not friends, they’re faces with bios and semi-frequent updates. Maybe you see them in person once in a while, maybe you don’t. It’s a dark, cynical world where we allow things as near and dear to us as friends and community to become less than they are. What starts as a semantic trick quickly becomes the new paradigm. Ultimately, I think we have a responsibility as professional communicators to speak honestly and think critically. It’s easy to slip and let things like “engagement with the community” get in the way of what’s truly at work. Let’s call things by name and name things correctly. Customers are customers, friends are friends, and community is the place where you live. AdPulp.com (via somethingchanged)

reblogged from somethingchanged

I think I’ve just figured out why it annoys me when people trivialise the conversations that take place on Twitter and Tumblr as merely ‘talking about what you had for breakfast’. Mostly I find these are the same people who quite happily sit around for hours and hours engaged in the most inane, insufferable real-life small talk. Where they ate dinner last night, what their hotel in Noosa was like, how their favourite sport team is going.

In contrast, the conversations I encounter online tend to be more interesting than most of the conversations I have in real life. At their best these conversations are far from small talk. They explore issues that don’t belong in mainstream discourse, in far more depth than real-world social interactions normally allow. They show an intellectual curiosity that defies the shallow expectations of our culture.

Trivialising these online conversations as merely being about early-morning epicurean tendencies reflects a naivety and disconnectedness that I’d suggest says more about the speaker than his subject.

Me (after, well, a few glasses of wine)

In Retrospect - Executives on How the AOL-Time Warner Merger Went So Wrong - NYTimes.com

fluffynotes:

MR. LEVIN I used to think at the time it was a clash of cultures and a misreading of the dot-com bubble, but I now upon reflection believe that the transaction was undone by the Internet itself.

I think it’s something that no one could have foreseen, and to this day, whether Apple is going to dominate entertainment or whether Amazon is going to dominate publishing, all the old business plans are out the window. How do you get paid for content? And the consumer has access to everything and now it’s going to be on a handheld device, so what I call the rolling thunder of the Internet started actually to eat its own, which was AOL. AOL was the Google of its time. It was how you got to the Internet, but it was using some old media business ideas that were undone by the Internet itself, and that’s why Google came along.

MR. PARSONS The business model sort of collapsed under us, and then finally this cultural matter. As I said, it was beyond certainly my abilities to figure out how to blend the old media and the new media culture. They were like different species, and in fact, they were species that were inherently at war.

In Retrospect - Executives on How the AOL-Time Warner Merger Went So Wrong - NYTimes.com

reblogged from fluffynotes

Let us in future be a bit more skeptical about the need to recreate the protest wheel. In almost all countries run by authoritarian regimes there is an untapped mass of activists, dissidents and anti-government intellectuals who have barely heard of Facebook. Reaching out to these offline but effective networks will yield more value than trying to badger bloggers to take up political activities. Western embassies working on the ground often excel at identifying and empowering such networks, and new media literacy should become part of diplomatic training. After all, these old-school types are the people who brought democracy to Central and Eastern Europe. And it will probably be them who win freedom for China and Iran too. From Evgeny Morozov’s article “Dictators.com” in the Perspective section of today’s AFR. I don’t really agree with his conclusions but it is an extremely good read and an excellent reminder that we must not idealise social media as the answer to all of the world’s problems.

vicemag:

THE VICE GUIDE TO ICELANDIC ELF SEX

Iceland is a country where the majority of people believe so firmly in elves extreme measures are taken to avoid upsetting them. Sometimes that means changing a road’s path to avoid elven territory, for Hallgerdur Hallgrímsdóttir, it means boning them. Hallgerdur claims many Icelanders have been doing elves in secret for centuries. There’s even a myth covering the inter-hominid couplings. Hallgerdur receives a lot of flack from her countrymen for spilling the beans on elf sex, so we hope you appreciate her act of smutty treason.

You can read a little more about Hallgerdur and watch even more videos about weird sex stuff you don’t know about here.

reblogged from vicemag

There’s a sense of social Darwinism at play here and while it might sound overly dramatic, it is for better or for worse, true. In the new era of influence, those businesses that understand where and how to compete for the future will earn a genuine and advantageous position to shape and steer the perception, prominence, and impact of the brand. It is this idea of competing for attention where it is focused, as it evolves, that will help businesses connect with people and thus set a new, efficient, and effective foundation for advocacy and community. Evolution of social media, by Brian Solis (via lanipauli)

reblogged from lanipauli

formspring.me

How do Web 2.0 platforms like formspring make money?

Mostly they don’t make money. Keep in mind that even Facebook didn’t turn cashflow-positive until last year and they have their own full-blown advertising platform running and a couple of hundred million users.

Most Web 2.0 startups keep themselves afloat with money from the founders, angel investors or VCs (or some combination of these). The idea is that once they achieve a certain scale, a viable ongoing commercial model will emerge. Or they plan to sell the business to someone else and let the new owners figure out the commercial model.

Some of them no doubt have a pretty clear idea what their commercial model will be right now but haven’t reached the scale needed to make it work yet. No doubt the smart guys & girls at Tumblr have a better long-term plan for making money than selling t-shirts.

Ask me anything

The old way of thinking in an agency was that you had a good copywriter and a good art director and they could conceive of and create anything that the agency did. TV, print, direct mail - they all had that particular reductive skill, that messaging skill. It’s not true now. There isn’t one set of talent that can do everything in our agency. R/GA chief creative officer Nick Law on lessons from 2010