We are witnessing the (slow) movement of the perception of video games as brain drainers and time zappers to being considered valuable educational material. One higher ed institution, Wabash College in Crawfordsville, Indiana, has made the leap, and the school will now have the video game “Portal™” as required “reading.” Professor Michael Abbot received approval to the have the game added to the curriculum of "Enduring Questions," a required seminar for all new students, which according to AOL’s Switched, acclimates them to critical readings and discussions in a college environment. (Read Professor Abbot’s reasoning behind the push to include the game in his popular gaming blog, The Brainy Gamer.) Switched reports that “Portal” will be used as a companion piece to a sociology reading, Erving Goffman's “Presentation of Self in Everyday Life,” and students will play the game as an “interactive illustration of the struggle over perception.”
Applause goes to those colleges and universities using the power of technology to educate, inspire, and motivate our digital youth.
I recently listened to Peter Shankman, of HARO fame, make a presentation. He discussed the diminishing attention span of America.
I am a typical Gen X’er. My generation was knocked for having short attention spans at about two minutes and thirty seconds. It is the approximate length of a music video on MTV, back when they used to play music videos. Today, we have the Twitter generation with an attention span of 140 characters. It takes about two and a half seconds to read a tweet.
For a client, it means consumer communication has to be focused. We know that even the news media communicates in 7-10 second soundbites. Can you answer the following questions about your company in a soundbite:
Who are you?
What do you do?
Why is that important?
These questions are not as easy as they seem. In my media training sessions, CEO’s tend to have the most difficulty giving brief answers about their company because they know so much and they want to communicate too much. "When we try to say too much, we say nothing at all," which is my next tweet in 50 characters. For more spokesperson tips, you can read my previous blog post on Six Ways to Improve Your Spokesperson Skills.
My first Social Fresh conference (@sofresh) was entertaining, educational and inspiring. Social Fresh is a one-day event packed with sessions and big-names in social media, including social media expert Wayne Sutton (@waynesutton), Amber Naslund from Radian 6 (@ambercadabra), David Thomas, formerly of SAS (@davidbthomas), and Bert DuMars from Newell Rubbermaid (@bwdumars). What I appreciated most was that sessions were not overwhelming, and the speakers avoided a regurgitation of concepts that, if you work in the social media space, you should really already know. I encourage anyone who has not experienced it to mark it on your calendar as a must-attend.
Through case studies from companies such as Sharpie, Rubbermaid and Coca-Cola (not their Facebook page, their “Happiness Machine” video), it was revealed that while you need to put some resources and manpower behind effective social media marketing, it’s the ability to strategize and align social media with your client’s overall goals and objectives that really determines who is successful. One company that stood out was Sharpie and how their campaign emphasizing the pen-maker as the tool for self-expression is augmented through social media—check out their “Doodle” project: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZqgacrYd2m8.
My key takeaways from the event:
-Great quote: “You don’t need a social media strategy. You need a brand strategy that incorporates social media.” —Chris Kirubi, Chairman, Coca-Cola Nairobi
-Online hype ≠ business results: Promotions and giveaways cannot be the base of your social media plan. DO NOT build your community solely through promos. If you “buy the consumer in,” what’s the strategy to retain them after the freebies end?
-Stand for something: Make sure you clearly define what your brand stands for, and develop social media tactics that align with brand position and extend from the larger marketing plan and strategy.
-“Build a fire extinguisher” (Amber Naslund, Radian 6): Teach your organization what a social media crisis looks like, create a crisis communications plan for your social media strategy and always document what you learned.
-Share and share alike: There should be no reason to not have an embed option when posting video—you must enable sharing of content to allow people to spread it throughout the social graph.
-Hire Thinking: Organizations are not hiring through the tools they’re asking candidates to know how to use (e.g., Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.). We have to re-think how we recruit—and retain—talent. New roles are a hybrid of skills and capabilities—we can no longer exist in a silo.
-Don’t be the blind leading the blind: It is imperative to guide clients through social media and outside of a narrow mentality, i.e., re-train their thoughts of social media results as only about fan counts and number of followers.
-The real social media role: Is about (1) story harvesting; (2) engagement; (3) listening; (4) providing success metrics; and (5) successful brand immersion and representation. If you consider yourself a social media marketer, ask yourself are YOU doing these things … well?
In 2002, I left the homeland in pursuit of a higher education and stepped onto a college campus with smiling faces, manicured lawns and the social buzz of freshmen meeting freshmen trying to meet seniors. I had many tools to help succeed in college, including tons of advice, bed sheets, cash for food, my first laptop and a real, tangible college face book. So there I was, with the forefront of social networking staring me right in the face – EARTH TO SCOTT. All I had to do was simply assimilate the actual face book into the laptop, publish it on the Internet and I would have been set, right? It would have been a turnkey solution for 500 million friends, unlimited publicity, substantial wealth and a movie about my story - featuring Justin Timberlake, no less. But not so quick.
On October 1, a new film by director David Fincher, The Social Network opens in theaters and gives us a behind the scenes look at the creation of the social networking machine that is Facebook; however, it seems directed more towards the social challenges and dark side of creating the largest social network, not the utopia of friends, likes and Farmville they’d like you believe. Starting with the early days at Harvard in 2003 and chronicling the past seven years, the film shows the road included quite a few bumps encountered between the friendships that built Facebook -- and how quickly friends can become enemies that sue each other for millions and millions of dollars. What on the surface appears to be the user friendly, happy social media site to the every day Facebook user, is actually quite the cutthroat business built on anything less than friendship. An irony not lost, I think.
The movie makes me wonder that after 500 million friends, over 7 years and billions of dollars in net worth, how many friends was it really worth? I’d be interested in asking Mark Zuckerberg someday. And now that he’s achieved, legendary status, how do you even know who your real friends are? I know I certainly couldn’t have handled it. But who’s to say that I won’t go back to college, move into another dorm looking for the next big idea. Then again, I shouldn’t try and reinvent the wheel, but I will probably go see the movie on how it was invented.
So while I can’t deny my genuine excitement about the return of Jersey Thursdays and the “original 8”, for those of us in the marketing realm, the impact this show has on social media is powerful enough to make any marketer fist pump. And according to Mashable, I’m not the only one that’s amped. During last night’s season premiere a Jersey Shore twitterfest rocked the twitterverse with an astounding 16,000 tweets per hour at 10p.m. ET, including enthusiastic tweets from celebs Jimmy Fallon and Lauren Conrad.
Leading up to the Season 2 debut, MTV released a Jersey Shore Facebook game and iPhone app. The Facebook game encourages players to battle each other in head-to-head pickle and tanning lotion throwing competitions, while the iPhone app lets users superimpose Snooki’s face on photos in their iPhone library. Sweet!
Oh, and did I mention that the Jersey Shore Facebook page has over 1.7 million “likes”? How about the Little Jersey Shore, an online parody featuring children playing the roles of the super-tan cast of Jersey Shore that garnered over one million views in just five days! Impressive.
Despite all the buzz, it seems the only person oblivious to the Jersey Shore hype, is President Obama. In the first appearance of any sitting president on a daytime TV talk show, Obama admitted he did not know who Snooki was to the ladies of The View yesterday. Whew! But, no worries. I’m sure Snooki will be texting him about the 10% tax increase on tanning before winter rolls around.
Whether you’re a Jersey Shore lover or hater—this deliciously controversial show deserves a fist pump for the social media frenzy its’ created. If you’re more prone to “beating up the beat”, that works, too.
There was a lot of chatter about “American Idol” last week. I’ve been an AI fan since its debut in 2002, and harbored dreams of auditioning myself (until I aged out a few years ago); but alas, it would have been a tough life trying to compete on a national television show, survive Simon’s comments, and keep up with work here at FWV.
By now, everyone knows Simon won’t be returning next season, creating a lot of skeptical fans, myself included. This news alone created quite a shake-up for FOX and TMZ recently reported that Kara DioGuardi was fired by AI producers. To make matters worse, Ellen DeGeneres says she won’t be returning either.
All of these changes could spell disaster for AI, which has already suffered a ratings hit during the past few seasons. Ratings for this year’s finale fell 19 percent from 2009, and have been on the decline since the show’s peak in 2006. Of course, the show is still doing great in comparison to others on TV right now and Randy seems to be hanging in there. AI’s producers need to come up with an impressive judges panel to make up for losing Simon and IMO, four judges was one too many. It will be a challenge to find the right mix of people who can do the job and have good chemistry – something FOX hasn’t been able to get right since Paula left. I won’t miss Ellen, and Kara was never one of my favorites, so I’m excited to see what they come up with next.
Perhaps this will be the best thing for the show? AI should take this opportunity to make a fresh start, as it’s probably the only hope to keep it going. The latest news from TMZ says next season’s judges panel will include Randy (of course), Jennifer Lopez (could be interesting and at least she’s a singer), and Stephen Tyler (another singer, yay!). Lopez and Tyler are both amazing performers, so maybe they can kick AI into high gear and make it interesting again. I hate to admit it, but I contributed to the show’s declining ratings. I just couldn’t make myself watch last season. If the show doesn’t pick up, I might have to completely ditch it for my new musical infatuation, “Glee.”
Whenever your rival school’s athletic program gets in trouble for something, it’s hard to not gloat. Well here at FWV we’re chock-full of Heels and Wolves and we’ve all basically fine-tuned the art of gloating to a science.
With that disclaimer, I’ll jump into what we’re really here to talk about, the funny intersection of college sports and politics.
Secretary of State Elaine Marshall is running for the U.S. Senate and make no mistake about it, she’s running hard. The first female to hold a statewide office in N.C., she enjoys a political machine from Murphy to Manteo that’s been fine-tuned since stepping foot into office in 1996. She’ll need every inch of that network and every outstanding favor from the past 14 years if she’s going to beat incumbent Richard Burr (see Who’s Afraid of the Big, Bad Burr?).
That’s why it came as somewhat of a surprise that led to a, “Well that’s smart” when I heard her on sports talk radio station 99.9 “The Fan” decrying the recent UNC-Chapel Hill/sports agent debacle. (I won’t delve into the story but the N&O has a good article on it here: http://www.newsobserver.com/2010/07/23/593879/davis-ncaa-will-rule-quickly.html).
Similar to how Marshall’s office polices the practices of businesses and lobbyists, she made the smart move to do the same for sports agents on the campuses of our 16 public universities – knowing North Carolinians keep their Tarheels, Pirates, etc., very close to their heart.
When I was a young boy I remember going to the State Fair and hearing over the loudspeakers, “Welcome to the North Carolina State Fair. I’m Commissioner of Agriculture Jim Graham…..” A brilliant politician and master of marketing, the “Sodfather” was one of the state’s longest-serving politicians (1965-2000). I’m sure the hundreds of thousands fair-goers associating the good times of the fair with him might have helped him there.
While elected officials aren’t supposed to use their office for election purposes, the line between politicking and state business can be a murky one. Marshall has shown a masterful move here and appears to be getting ready for a tough fight by pulling out the brass knuckles and chains – tactics she’ll need to win.
As we get closer to Labor Day and the “official” start of campaign season, we’ll see if Elaine has the grit and more importantly, the cash, to make this race winnable. As of right now, it’s at least shaping up to be a good one to watch.
The fourteen Triangle-area Moe’s Southwest Grill locations recently announced their partnership with the 2009 Triple-A National Champion Durham Bulls to launch a three-year promotional deal. As part of that deal, we are working with the Triangle marketing cooperative to attend events in the community with the help of the first-ever Wool E. Bull Moe-bile vehicle, which travels with the team’s well-loved mascot, Wool E. Bull, to an estimated 300 events and special appearances every year. Throughout the season, the Wool E. promotional team attends games, community and store events to play games and offer chances to win prizes including Durham Bulls tickets and an iPad.
As part of the promo team, we see first-hand the positive interaction consumers are having with the Moe’s brand. Whether at a store radio remote or out at a fundraising 5k, we see people making the connection that Moe’s is not just a place to eat but a part of our community. Durham Bulls’ fans are also enjoying the Moe’s presence at games throughout the season. Moe’s is all about fun, family, friends and great food, it’s a perfect pairing with America’s favorite pastime.
In addition, the partnership with the Bulls benefits fans by providing them with exclusive catering offers by visiting www.MoesTriangleCatering.com. There are specials for both kids and adults that can used for meetings, parties and backyard fiestas. So be sure to honk if you see the Moe-bile around town, stop by to toss a game of “Moe’s Bags” or pick up a popular hand fun in the sweltering North Carolina summer, and call your local Moe’s to spice up your next office meeting or party.
I am sure there are a lot of people that are tired of hearing about the oil spill, others that are constantly intrigued by the daily updates, and those people that are actually suffering the devastation that President Obama has called the worst environmental disaster America has ever faced. Regardless of where you stand, here is an initiative that FWV was able to accomplish on behalf of our client Security Point Media in an effort to assist in any way we can.
Before the oil had even hit Florida’s beaches, the negative effects on the tourism industry began washing ashore. Of all the threatened states, Florida has the most to lose. Tourism is its economic lifeblood, its largest industry, generating $60 billion in spending from more than 80 million visitors a year, bringing in 21 percent of all state sales taxes and employing nearly 1 million Floridians. Tourism is already experiencing signs of suffering even in areas as yet unaffected by oil on the beach.
As the innovator of airport security checkpoint advertising, Security Point Media has the ability to engage with an elusive but highly coveted group of consumers: people who like to travel. By enlisting the support of the American Advertising Federation and along with Zappos.com, the company conceived the “Champion a Cause” Creative Challenge hoping to leverage the creative juices of over 40,000 AAF members nationwide. The challenge is to design a SecureTray® campaign advertisement reminding travelers that the Sunshine State is open for business. The goal is to keep Florida-bound flights full.
The 1st place winning design will be produced and featured in select airports across the country compliments of SecurityPoint Media, and will also receive $1,000. Prizes will also be awarded to 2nd and 3rd place. All winners will be featured on the AAF website, the SecurityPoint Media website and in a press release announcement.
Besides recognition, I hope that AAF members all around the country see the unique opportunity they have to contribute their creative talent in a way that will ultimately help the state of Florida in this time of crisis. And, I certainly am looking forward to viewing the designs and being a part of such positive project in light of this disaster.
SecurityPoint Media works in compliance with the Transportation Safety Administration and has successfully streamlined airport check-in processes in 22 airports nationwide. For more details, visit http://www.securitypointmedia.com.
8”, for those of us in the marketing realm, the impact this show has on social media is powerful enough to make any marketer fist pump. And according to Mashable, I’m not the only one that’s amped. During last night’s season premiere a Jersey Shore twitterfest rocked the twitterverse with an astounding 16,000 tweets per hour at 10p.m. ET, including enthusiastic tweets from celebs Jimmy Fallon and Lauren Conrad.
Despite all the buzz, it seems the only person oblivious to the Jersey Shore hype, is President Obama. In the first appearance of any sitting president on a daytime TV talk show, Obama admitted he did not know who Snooki was to the ladies of The View yesterday. Whew! But, no worries. I’m sure Snooki will be texting him about the 10% tax increase on tanning before winter rolls around.
As part of that deal, we are working with the Triangle marketing cooperative to attend events in the community with the help of the first-ever Wool E. Bull Moe-bile vehicle, which travels with the team’s well-loved mascot, Wool E. Bull, to an estimated 300 events and special appearances every year. Throughout the season, the Wool E. promotional team attends games, community and store events to play games and offer chances to win prizes including Durham Bulls tickets and an iPad.
Durham Bulls’ fans are also enjoying the Moe’s presence at games throughout the season. Moe’s is all about fun, family, friends and great food, it’s a perfect pairing with America’s favorite pastime.
Before the oil had even hit Florida’s beaches, the negative effects on the tourism industry began washing ashore. Of all the threatened states, Florida has the most to lose. Tourism is its economic lifeblood, its largest industry, generating $60 billion in spending from more than 80 million visitors a year, bringing in 21 percent of all state sales taxes and employing nearly 1 million Floridians. Tourism is already experiencing signs of suffering even in areas as yet unaffected by oil on the beach.