CrapHammer

C2C, the way to go.

Consumer to consumer transactions used to be a wash.  They stayed inside country borders for the most part.

But today, consumer to consumer transactions are changing the world.  Consumers are transacting serious business across country borders in ways that just didn't happen before.

Ebay, etsy lulu, shopify, etc.

Digital technologies mean that we can reach people further away.

Digital intermediaries mean we can effectively transact online.

9 year old Rhain Davies knows the power.  His grandfather posted a youtube video of his son's football highlights.  Never expecting his grandson to be found and signed by a major football club, but that's exactly what has happened.

Doc Searls is focusing a variety of these phenomenon at the Harvard University project VRM. It's worth checking out.

"VRM, or Vendor Relationship Management, is the reciprocal of CRM or Customer Relationship Management. It provides customers with tools for engaging with vendors in ways that work for both parties."

The principles are very familiar to all of us involved in this age of conversation:  User-centricity, "Reduce, Re-use, Recycle, Reciprocity, Network Effect, Relationships...  What is different is their initiatives.  This is not just talking about things.  It's engaging people to grow VRM.

"[one initiative] is making it easy for listeners and viewers of public broadcasting to pay for the goods they get on the radio or over the Net.  Right now only 10% of those listeners contribute to their public stations..."

Image Source: Nicobobinus

Stop treating viral as a sickness

I get value from copying and replicating ideas, memes, concepts, term papers and even points of view. 

It's how I relate to the world around me.  I copy those I respect and even those I don't.  The choice of what I replicate comes mainly from my sense of identity and those subcultures that I believe myself to be a part of.  This accounts for my lack of conscious control over what I choose to replicate and pass on and speaks to just how present and aware we must be if we want to change who we are.

Which leads me to my soapbox.

So often in this industry (marketing), we say viral but what we're really thinking is "epidemic".  And we are doing a great disservice to everyone.  Because viral is simply the act of self publishing combined with  the transmission of an idea.  It's more closely related to Richard Dawkin's work on meme transmission  than it is to epidemic outbreaks.

I think most of the "viral crap" I'm sent on a weekly basis is because we are focused solely on creating an epidemic.  And we don't want to discuss a strong Point of view (have an opinion!), Relevance, or the Value to the receiver AND to the subculture.

And tying "viral" to "epidemic" outbreaks also means we are using the model of "infection" rather than "sharing" or "involvement."

Great post over at mindblob's hacienda about viral which quotes a Columbia professor talking about how most "viral" relies on absurd humour with no cultural relevance.  Ties in with a wonderful post and conversation over at Get Shouty where she points to the strength of emerging (and ancient) "gift economies".

So I stopped to think about the model for creating something worthy of becoming a meme.  Something worthy of being shared and growing into something larger.

Point of View:  The piece has to stand for something.  It has to have an opinion or position that resonates with the viewer. It has to be part of something bigger.  Mentos & Coke:  creativity, art, geek, ...   Evolution: social power to control women's self esteem,

Relevance: Humor has been a big part of viral campaigns, epidemic and otherwise.  Ever find something funny that wasn't relevant?  Humor breaks down barriers because it takes concepts that might be difficult for us and breaks down the barriers.  It humanizes a message.  (EXAMPLES:

Value: Everyone talks about value to the viewer.  Well, duh.  But what about value to the subculture you are interacting with? 

We like to think of memes as simple little devices.  But they are anything but.  They are complex, difficult to detect and often synonymous with the memeplex from which they emerge.  One could argue that to pull a meme out of its "culture" would be to make the meme unintelligible.  The blogging subculture, for example, is full of hundreds, if not thousands of memes that are difficult to view outside of the culture from which they flourish.

There will be epidemic outbreaks of ideas.  But these will always be the exception.  Our world will actually fight to ensure this is the case.  It has to.  Otherwise we will all be overwhelmed and unable to function; we will be inundated with singing pringle cans, dancing babies and fat guys lip synching.  Society will crash to a halt as we will all be too busy sharing and copying the same ideas on a global scale, slowly becoming an autonomous single macro-culture with no dissenting views, no creativity, and no revolutions.

The BRAIN is a way better metaphor than "epidemic".  And I wish I had thought of it.

"And like our brain, there is no conscious authority controlling how the messages get passed from node to node. The navigation is intuitive and organic."

"This is the desired effect, but this new structure seems dauntingly chaotic. If the path of a message cannot be dictated by any authoritative source and broadcast to a passive audience, then how is it possible to create a strategy to effectively reach an audience that is likely to find the message relevant and compelling?"

--- Mike Arauz writing on how to navigate new media.

Top Image Source: Quiplash! 

This post brought to you by Mister Wong

All my friends are on del.icio.us.  And they give me never-ending crap for being on an alternative service called ma.gnolia.  And here it is.

I'm NOT on either of these services anymore cause of the damn periods.  Takes me days to remember how to spell these crazy things.

So I switched to a new social bookmarking services called Mister-Wong.  I loved their logo.  Which they have since removed because people felt it was anti-asian.  Gah.

But imagine my surprise when I was informed I won an Ipod.  I never win anything.  Ever.  Turns out, the folk at Mister-Wong had a contest running for early users.  And they selected 3 people to win an ipod. 

Above is a screenshot of me looking up my storefront tag.  Click on it to view full size.

I like how fast and easy to use Mister-Wong is while keeping the graphical/design feel that I don't get in del.icio.us.  And tagging a site doesn't time out with the crazy Ajax thing ma.gnolia uses.

And I love winning an 8 gig ipod nano.  ;)

So, If I win something and enjoy the service and then blog about it, am I a dirty blogger???

COTTAGE - OH DEAR LORD PLEASE!!!

Every year, we close up shop at my company and we all head up to a cottage for a week.

And every year, the act of closing up shop for a week becomes a joyous experience of counting down days and counting up the number of last minute emergencies.  ;)

This year was no different.  My apologies for not being more active.  I've done my best to get a few posts tightened into shape and set them to publish over the next few days.

See you all in a week!

Image:  Remi (head of our film group) at last year's cottage

modeling brands

I'm back... and working on a few posts.

In the interim, I'm catching up on my reading and was bowled over by a simple and insightful post from a wonderfully insatiable planner.

"simplicity is good but being simplistic isn't."

Image Source: camil tulcan

Age.

I love how there are NO points of data other than your current age in this calculator.  And whatever you put, it just subtracts from 76.5.

How long do you have?

CK rocks the Cazbah!

When my team came up with the idea to do a video on the arrival of the AOC books, we hoped to spark some interest in the initiative.

And while we expected some type of reaction, we certainly did not expect to have anyone bake cookies from scratch, individually wrap them, and then mail them to Canada.

But that's exactly what CK did.

You rock our world, baby.  Thank you.

And amazing cookies to boot!

(The whole team is loving the cookies, but they wanted me to get "nekkid" for a photo in our boardroom.  Sigh.)

Journalists beware!!

Following in the footsteps of the burrito'meister himself, here's an idea for anyone to do with as they please.

It seems everyone is getting in on this crowd sourcing phenomenon of late.  Which is funny as it's not a new concept, just one that technology now makes more feasible.  At the heart of this trend is the idea of empowering "citizens" to collect news for the rest of us.  [BBC, USA Today, NowPublic] 

One of my friends, who is a journalist, is quite down on the blog phenomenon as a result of this movement.  To her, journalism itself hangs in the balance.  And from this perspective, I find it hard to argue with her.

In my talks with David Reich the other day, the topic came up as he's been considering an article on this issue. He had read about another outfit looking to report on news stories submitted by the general public.  The question being, what happens to the journalists?

Crowd sourcing is an opportunity.  And digital self-publishing is here to stay.  Does this mean journalism is something to be relegated to niche markets and the pages of history?  Rather than throw out the old for some who-knows-what realm of mass-mind utopia, why not bring the two worlds together?

What about a site that used bloggers and citizens to help collect stories, but that was run by journalists?  A place where journalists work with the army of collaborators.  Where journalists set the tone and hand pick members of the community to mentor and educate.  Where ones standing in the community is a result of ones work and interaction with the journalists and editors running the site. 

It could leverage the opportunities of crowd sourcing while working to grow a new world of journalism.  One in which stories can have integrity and the role of the press brought forward with us into this new age.   And, most importantly, it would allow journalists to excite and interact with a younger generation and help to spark relevance in those who might otherwise never even consider it.

Just an idea.  Maybe it already exists?

Image Source: Chuckumentary

Dinner in the Sky

A gourmet meal suspended 50 meters in the air. 

[link to embedded video]

Creativity has no bounds.  I never would have thought to combine an amusement park with high end cuisine.

For those wanting to get a reservation, head over to Dinner in the Sky.

Thanks to Luc over at mindblob for this one!

Take a walk...

Time to come clean, I was bored on the weekend and turned to searching Google for links to the ol' craphammer.  And I stumbled across something I'd never heard of before.

walk2web

Have some time to wander around the web?  The screen reader was a bit annoying but the trail of footsteps was actually emotionally satisfying. 

My quick review. 

• The experience was smooth, well thought out and innovative.
• The commenting and tagging was easy to do and engaging.
• Lack of access to the RSS content of the sites I was visiting was annoying.  Had to open any new site in a new window to see if it was of interest.
• The walk2web in-tool rating system was perplexing.  But the ability to tag the site with digg, del.icio.us and stumbleupon was well done.

What I loved about this was how it worked to make our inter-blog relationships more visible and how the developer was providing a new way to interact with these relationships.  This type of experimentation is going to lead to some very powerful and interesting tools in our future.

But sadly, this is not yet at a point where I would find it addictive or useful enough to continue using.