We've Moved!

He team,

The blog is now situated at http://www.radicallove.com.au

Pop over if you want to stay up to date and re-subscribe! Sweet!

Why So Silent?

If you're wondering why I haven't been posting for the last few months, it's because our website update with our new blog has been chronically held up.

Apologies to those waiting on my every word. I'll let you know when the new space is up and running soon!

The Social Minimum

I've been chatting to a few brand representatives lately and one of the most resounding questions I (surprisingly) get asked is "what is the bare minimum my company should be doing in the social space?"

It's an interesting question, and I usually answer it with the idea that any interaction is better than none at all. But I thought I might lay out some key thoughts about the issue for everyone to feast upon.

The first thing you can do is get online and have a look at the free tools available to you. Open a Facebook page, start a twitter account, post something to YouTube or Flickr. The reason for this is to get a basic understanding of the rules and possibilities of the online world. It's not until you start typing tweets that you realise there's a craft to communication in 140 characters. Similarly, you'll never know what a subscribing to a YouTube channel does until you give it a go.

So my first piece of advice is step out of the comfort zone and start getting your creative hands dirty in the cyber sandpit. Do all this under a pseudonym if it makes you feel at ease, but it's important to play around. Two hours playing on Facebook will teach you more than a 97 page guide.

The second tip is to understand the classification systems that social networks use.

Remember years ago when you needed new glasses and tried to look them up in the Yellow Pages. Nothing under "G" for glasses... Nothing under "S" for spectacles... Nothing under "E" for "eyewear"... Nothing under "L" for lenses...

20 minutes later you'll finally work out that unless you know "optometry" is the profession dealing with eyes, you could spend a lifetime digging through those giant yellow books.

This is an example of a failure of taxonomy, and the reason why Google is such a powerful search engine. Knowing the terms (or "keywords") that are required for anyone and everyone to find your content is critical to the success of content sharing across social networks.

I encourage people to include keywords wherever possible in the content they're creating. This will help improve your ranking on Google and make your content more accessible to a wider reach of targeted audiences.

If you're wondering what your keywords are, I suggest looking at the statistical information on your website (usually via your hosting package). If your hosting package doesn't included this, sign up to a free service like Google Analytics. It can perform the same data crunching.

Also, it's worth signing up for Google Alerts (another free service) that will let you know where people are talking about your company and alert you anytime your company name is found in a new post by the Google bots.

Twitter search and Twitter lists are also valuable insights. Search for your brand on Twitter and see what comes up. Alternatively, check out the lists your account has been added to (and more importantly the names of those lists). They might give you some keywords that could help extend your audience reach and relevancy.

Another good place is Social Mention, which can quickly break down keywords associated with your brand from sites across the social web. Like Google Alerts, it will give you an insight into all the places you're mentioned, but with more specific focus on social networks. It's also real-time, rather than just new content.

Another "minimum idea" is to create a publishing schedule that allows for reusable content. What I mean by this is using the strengths of the different platforms to develop an understanding of audience relevancy and engagement.

Think about how you communicate information to your audience. The time it takes to share ideas on Twitter or Facebook is much faster than via email or blog. Set up a timetable of frequency for posting information that allows popular content to be repurposed.

In practice, this would probably included sharing a lot of ideas on Twitter (around five a day). The three most popular tweets might then become three Facebook status updates. The two most popular status updates might then become blog articles, and the most popular blog article might then become a feature in your emailed newsletter.

This organic funnelling of information means you can ensure proven relevancy is maintained within your target audience as time commitments to social content increase. This model also encourages experimentation on a real-time platform like Twitter and seeing what sticks, then building from that popularity. It takes guesswork out of content for brands new to the social space and is something I'd recommend every workplace consider.

With these three approaches (get involved, know your keywords and an effective content publishing schedule) you should quickly make an impact on your bottom-line objectives...

Or if nothing else, extend the quality and quantity of your audience in the social space.

Online News - Using Video To Build Audience

For years now the news industry has been questioning the place for video in its online publications. Indeed smh.com.au and news.com.au have been trying to justify the place for this expensive, revenue-lacking and resource-sapping medium for almost a decade now, and it seems those sites that stuck with it are finally seeing the benefits; namely increased time on site and engaging viewers in a way traditional text media cannot.

A great case study in this was recently presented by the Miami Herald. Last year, MiamiHerald.com saw a 25 percent growth in video traffic, making it the second biggest traffic driver behind articles. The strategies in achieving this are nothing new, but what the Miami Herald has done is commit to its video content and tailored its output to suit the community it serves.

Audience Insights:

• Breaking news and sports videos generate the most views, in sync with their text content.
• The number one video on MiamiHerald.com last year got about 26,000 views and was a feature on how to handle frozen iguanas.
• The top videos were tied to breaking news and sports stories about a Playboy model who was murdered; five teenagers who were found dead in a hotel; and the construction of the Marlins’ new ballpark.

What we see here is a need for content to have a defined audience and exist in a space where that audience is already consuming content. This is the philosophy of Radical Love's "Social Video" concept, where video needs to have socially engaging qualities or it will not stand out from the noise of the internet's increasingly video-saturated digital ecosystem.

Content Insights:

• Shorter is better.
• Completion rates indicate popularity and engagement.
• Search optimisation is still problematic.

The Miami Herald originally tried to emulate the television news model of two-minute video pieces, but quickly found these drive limited and weak traffic. Online news is about being an insider to the action and recreating the experience of the event for the viewer. It's about being raw, immediate and compelling, and packaging that up in the shortest time possible.

Increase in video completion (which is over 50% on MiamiHerald.com) also has the benefit of reducing bounce rates across the site.

In terms of making the content, the Miami Herald employs two full-time videographers and two part-time videographers/photographers. This is essential in a small-staff environment as attempts at multi-skilling journalists lead to a decrease in quality across video and print media. It also fostered frustration from the workforce who didn't understand how to utilise communication in the visual medium.

Today, the Miami Herald produces 14 videos a week but struggles to offset costs with advertising revenue. Pre-roll advertising still isn't anywhere near covering the cost of production (despite the growing popularity of video), but sponsorship deals (especially in sport) for studio production are helping to close the gap.

Another strategy is cross-promotion of brand, with the Miami Herald sharing its 70-odd videos each month with television partners in the area. This increases the brand reach and drives more interest in the site. They also repost all their content to YouTube, which often gets thousands more views than the website itself.

Regarding innovation, the Miami Herald has been experimenting in longer-form documentary filmmaking. They recently produced a one-hour video on Haiti in partnership with public broadcasters and independent filmmakers. Knowing their was an appetite for the subject within their audience, the longer format worked with over 1 million hits contributed to it alone last January (an impressive 13% of all hits for all video content last year).

This is a format the Miami Herald is keen to continue. The cross-promotion with broadcast coupled to the longevity of the content popularity beyond the short-term news cycle are good reasons for the model to be further explored.

In regards to third-party video (such as content produced by the Associate Press), I think it's important to find a balance between local content and world events. Ensuring that news websites have the capacity to produce timely localised content will become increasingly important as geo-location applications become more ubiquitous in society.

Originally, many news providers were hesitant to feature national or international news video on their websites. What the Miami Herald has learned is that these bigger stories can draw audiences into their network and even provide localised opinion on bigger issues.

The future of video content online is clear, even if the financial models surrounding it are not. In an ever-increasing world of mobile screens and a growing demand for immediacy in information, news providers must ensure they are at the forefront of localised video content. Those that stick with a willingness to produce will see reward, so long as they stay true to their audience and devlop content that feeds their niche or market segment.

Twitter Isn't News, It's Entertainment

Imagine aliens have just arrived on earth from Mars in Dubbo, NSW. A small crowd gathers to welcome our intergalactic visitors and waits for them to speak. There first question, having monitored human communications for thousands of years, would probably be this:

"What is Twitter?"

The crowd huddles to determine the best response. Twitter fanboys would take the company line and scream "a micro-blogging service that lets you tell others what you are doing", but this would be shot down by the tech-heads who would be more purist and state "it's a source of personal news from anyone anywhere". Young teens would rebut not all tweets are news-based or reflective of current events, and that "the SMS of the internet" is a better answer.

As the tension grew and the debate heated up, an elderly woman would almost always be certain to chime in with the classic "it's a pointless form of time-wasting" in a stereotypical, grumpy-old-woman way...

And I would agree.

Now, before you start typing out hate mail, know that what I'm talking about here is the transition of Twitter from a source of personal interest to a form of personal expression. Twitter is now evolving into a place of entertainment, not news or information (although these are still very important.

Take a look at the trend data for Twitter in 2010 and you quickly see hashtags and entertainment now make 70% of Twitter's trend categories over sport, news, business and other topics. This rise in entertainment and hashtagging (hashtagging rose over 400% since 2009) suggests that users of Twitter are more focused on using the platform as a means of self-entertainment rather than as a place for news and information (that said, I should point out these services have been squeezed, not replaced, by the rise in hashtagging popularity).

In fact, Twitter is more in common with social gaming these days than a news service. If you're willing to imagine an online word game, where players are given a topic or event or question and the aim is to get as many people reading your response to that question as possible, then we can suddenly view Twitter in a whole new way. The winners of this game will have broad-reaching wit and rhetoric as skills, and approach answers to questions in a remarkable and interesting fashion.

This is what we see evolving with Twitter. It is World of Warcraft in text format; a world-wide multiplayer game where everyone wants their response read and retweeted to feel that same satisfaction that comes from collecting a star in Super Mario World or killing a green pig in Angry Birds.

Hashtagging (such as #itsasmelbourneas or #mymotheralwayssaid) is the new entertainment arm of twitter, and it's on the rise. It is pointless and useless like all good entertainment, and it has a built-in reward system (retweets) and rules (140 characters only!) like any good game. At its core, the Twitter community is becoming more adept at entertaining each other and themselves, rather than relying on external sources of entertainment from brands and businesses to drive interest.

For brands, much like aliens, the critical factor is understanding what Twitter is in action, not what it is in theory, and above all, joining the game.

Some Fresh Tips for Those New To Online Marketing

So, the cocktails have been put down and the laptop has been opened up. Time for me to share some fresh knowledge to the world, and today we're talking online marketing.

I thought I'd share a few insights I've collected over the past years as to how to market more effectively online as a brand, a business, or just a fame-seeking individual.

First up, I want to talk about blogging. This self-preaching technology has been around for a decade now, but some people are still unsure how to utilise it. The key rule, like all marketing, is to know your audience! Forget how cool your video embedding is, or how funny the animated cat GIF at the bottom of the page is, or how insightful and well-structured your writing is... If you don't know who you're talking to, then you've missed the point.

Always think about what your readers are interested in. This will rarely be your new company coffee machine or your amazing summer holiday to Dubbo. If you're selling shoes, then talk about shoes, and from every angle. Talk about style, design, materials, stores, innovations, opportunities, etc. Don't talk about your weekly sales range. Keep it on topic and interesting.

If you give your audience information about what interests them, you can't lose!

Secondly, I want to talk about reward. It's something a lot of marketeers overlook, but you need to analyse who your biggest fans are and reward them. What that reward is (free stuff, a phone call, a discount coupon) is irrelevant; the point is you need to keep an ear to the digital floor and listen to who is talking about you.

Those 5% of your fans/customers that bring in new business, that re-tweet your stuff, that blog about your products... They are the people you need to reward. Always thank a fan, and always monitor social media conversations. There's plenty of free applications that do this (like Social Mention and Google Alerts). Keep an eye out for your brand in social forums, and take note of who the talkers are.

Finally, know that people engage with people, not brands. If the holiday season has taught you anything, it's that David Jones the brand (quiet, elegant, sophisticated, supportive) is very different to David Jones the people (loud, rushed, overworked, high-school kids/retirees). The people who make the sale at the end of the day are the tangible representatives of your brand. Make sure you don't overlook people as part of your marketing experience, even if it's in the form of Twitter voices or Facebook contributors.

Also, as a side note, make sure your online marketing is consistent with your overall marketing strategy. Online and heritage marketing platforms should be crafted to create synergies, not resistance.

So welcome to 2011, the year when Radical Love takes over the world*.


Well, we'll start with Sydney...

Tribute to Blake Edwards

Sad day for me today with the news my cinematic directing idol, Blake Edwards, has passed away. Many of his films have shaped my appreciation and interest in producing comedic visual content, and although a blog entry does not amount to much, I just wanted to share my sense of loss.

On the social media side, I'll be interested to see if digital sales in some of his films receive a spike from this news (much like Michael Jackson's catalogue soared to popularity again following his equally tragic death earlier this year). I think they will.

If you want to help my prediction out I recommend you all grab a copy of Breakfast At Tiffany's (1961), The Great Race (1965) and Return of the Pink Panther (1975)

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Quantity Vs Quality in the Micro-blogging-sphere

I was recently down in Melbourne giving a keynote on the future of social media for Open Connections. In the much-anticipated networking drinks I was asked a question I've heard several times before - "How do I get more followers on Twitter?"

This type of thinking usually shows a misunderstanding as to what Twitter is all about, but there are two solutions to this simple problem:

1) Pay for them.

2) Talk to them.

There are plenty of services out there that will spill 1000's of followers onto your account for a fee. Why anyone would want to do this is beyond me, unless your customers are lifeless server racks somewhere off the coast of Sri Lanka.

Twitter is a tool for connection and conversation. And conversation is part talking, part listening. Spam is not a form of communication, so don't treat Twitter like a soapbox for shouting. Find the niche your brand already fits into, listen in to the conversations taking place, then start offering unique, useful and genuine solutions/comments/ideas. This is no place to force-feed the company line, which is why many brands feel hesitant to engage with customers on Twitter.

You want quality followers, not a mass quantity of followers. It's better to have one follower who might buy your products than a million followers who never will.

Today, this "Quantity Vs Quality" concept has been rewritten for the social media landscape as "Popularity Vs Influence". Where you stand in regards to influencing people's opinions and habits is much more powerful than how many people you're connected to. Being a key influencer is really the goal of every social media manager in any organisation.

So if you're worried you're not performing on Twitter due to a lack of followers, do not be disheartened. So long as you've built a following through engaging and responsive conversation with customers you're in a far more influential space than those who have paid for pointless popularity.

Weather Stations Vs Swarm Intelligence

It happens every weekend for me. I wake up, check the weather on my phone, dress appropriately, then find myself sweating or freezing to death outside when the real weather is often the complete opposite of the cute icons on my online weather service.

It always perplexes me how we can spend billions of dollars on satellites, weather stations, pressure sensors, tide monitors and weather balloons only to be so completely off the mark day-in, day-out.

Last weekend I was at Sydney's iconic Bondi Beach. The weather had been sunny, but was about to storm. I checked my phone to get some indication of how much sunshine I had left, but neither Yahoo, Weatherzone or the official government Bureau of Meterology had any reference to a storm occurring...

A panicked thought went through me: Could the internet be wrong?

Suddenly I had a thought:

If we got everyone on the beach to guess the temperature, and guess what the weather would do based on their own experiences, would we get a more truthful result than empirical scientific apparatus and algorithms?

Tie this in with a service that is geo-location specific, maybe current photos of the skyline, opinions and polls, and perhaps we use our collective, non-specialist predictions to provide a better weather service to humanity?

It would be both a beautiful experiment and a wonderful idea.

Salad With Ren & Stimpy

I achieved a boyish brush with fame today when I was able to visit Jim Ballantine at his Sydney-based Flying Bark studios.

For those of you wondering what I'm talking about, this is the guy who made Ren and Stimpy a reality and changed the course of my tweenage years (not to mention my definition of what "funny" is).

As we sat over salads and sparkling water I was interested to hear Jim speak of the early days of Ren and Stimpy, when the network only had six episodes. These episodes would be repeated on rotation for 18 months. Each week, more and more people began watching the show and the network finally twigged that more content was needed.

This was back in the early 90's, which although is nearly 20 years ago now is essentially an analogue version of how YouTube success can be created. I saw many similarities between this and the Beached Az content I've been involved in over at The Handsomity Institute.

Jim was quick to point out the cruel impact of the digital social world on this method of building an audience; "I don't think this model would work now," Jim says.

Nonetheless I am always captivated when my eyes are opened up to moments that show me online content isn't the new and scary territory many paint it out to be. It is merely an extension of what we've been doing since not only 20 years ago, but since the birth of communication itself...

Telling stories.

Bring On Micropayments

For a while I've been frustrated at how hard it is to sdhare money around the web. Those of you who have endured one of my "light-on-the-facts-high-on-the-fizz" keynotes will know one of my visions for the future of the web is a payment system that allows us to share our money as easily as we currently share photos, text and video.

Sadly, that day isn't here yet, and we're still at the mercy of clumsy credit card systems, iTunes gated spaces and the profit-destroying PayPal options.

However, I was interested in the recent move by Facebook to sell Facebook Credits at Walmart and Target in the USA.

The current targeting of social gamers is validation of the power and growth of that area of online networking. If Facebook are exploring the territory aggressively, you know there must be some value to be found.

What I like most about this move by Facebook is that it has the potential to be applied across multiple platforms and perhaps become the web currency that we've been waiting for. Facebook has a quorum of users to give the scheme momentum, as well as an established marketplace and quite liberal anti-protectionist positioning. This small step of using Facebook Credits in the social gaming sphere with hopefully be used as a test case to iron out problems and collect consumer feedback.

I'm hoping in the coming months Facebook Credits will become a monetary extension of Facebook Connect, allowing anyone and everyone across the net to embed payment systems on their blogs, apps, websites, forums and pages. This will certainly spell out the beginning of a financial revolution as an online economy is born and raising revenue is a simpler task without being at the mercy of closed shops or expensive alternatives.

Bringing Advertising To Social Gaming

In the late 1800's, Jules Verne was approached by shipping operators to include references of their companies in his 1874 classic Around the World In Eighty Days. With these simple requests the age of product placement was born, and is a tool that still permeates our cinema, television, sporting and radio experiences.

136 years later, the new battlefield for brands is in the social media spaces, and no area is more ready to pop than social gaming.

In a report from Nielson analysing online habits of Americans between July 2009 and June 2010, it was shown that social gaming had surpassed personal email as the second most popular activity on the web (over 56 million Americans play online social games).

This (no doubt) will come as a shock to a lot of brands and businesses that still think the world of gaming is restricted to a youth/teen market. The ubiquitous assimilation of smartphones and social networking has presented society with a way to connect beyond the realm of status updates and political-career-ending party photos.

Our leisure time is now under assault from advertisers keen to find new markets and engage consumers in unique and interesting ways.

I think it's important to note here that brands must be willing to bend their brand image to suit the narrative of the social games they seek to interact with. Much like putting a video on YouTube and expecting it to go "viral" is a fallacy, expecting to stick your brand name in any social game will also miss the mark. Being creative in integration is just as important as being integrated when it comes to social gaming.

Personal case study: I always remember playing GoldenEye 64 in the late 1990's, and one of the tasks for me (AKA James Bond) was to recover a top secret video recording from a Russian bunker. When I discovered that recording was actually a VHS of the GoldenEye movie (complete with cover art) I literally got a little excited. I can only thank the lord in-app purchasing wasn't available in those days or I would have spent a lot of money.

So how can we integrate? How can brands get on board this social gaming wagon?

Currently the social gaming experience is dominated by brands and businesses offering retail goods, subscription services, surveys and branded videos. Engaging with these businesses online usually results in some form of virtual credit or currency.

Personally I like the idea of branded goods within the game as an easy first-step for brands. I find it has wider scope for creativity than the Hit Wall and less costly than building your own branded game. Have a look around the online space at some of the more popular games out there, and think about what virtual rewards or goods you might be able to offer players (read: "your consumers").

As always, think outside the box and keep it creative/radical. We play games to escape reality, so don't try and drag what you do in other media campaigns back through the digital door unchanged and expect results.

Photography From Radical Love's Anthony MacFarlane

I thought the social media world should be aware that the talents of Anthony MacFarlane are not limited to his handsome good looks nor his boyish charm.

It turns out the man takes a mean still image to compliment his broad talents in the realm of motion pictures.

For those that don't subscribe to his weekly blog updates over at rival blog community web.me.com I'm going to try and convince the man that art has a place in this space, and get him to post some of his finest here.

To start things moving I've chosen one of my favourites above, entitled "Madonna". This is possibly because of the very American legs on display, or possibly it was the soundtrack to the photoshoot...

Or maybe there's a religious element to all this I'm missing.

Either way, Macca himself says:

This is a composition of sea water taken at Bronte pool and a rough sandstone wall in the back of Waverley. The angles of the legs were to replicate the lines in the stonework.

Just awesome.

Virgin Blue Social Media Content

Big thanks to all the good eggs at Virgin Blue (especially Sir Richard Branson and John Borghetti) for letting us run a-muck in Melbourne during your 10th Birthday Celebration.

It was "unique" to spend four consecutive days within 50m of an airport, and unless we have our own volcanic action in the coming years, an event unlikely to be repeated in the history of my life.

Great people. Great times. Thanks!

Politics & Social Media? Boring? Wait For 2030!

And so finally today Australia has a government (according to my Twitter feed anyways)! After a long election campaign that bored half the nation to sleep, followed by secret talks that scraped in on the lowest rung of news-worthiness, we can now get on with tweeting and posting disgruntled comments about our newly-appointed representatives.

Looking back over the 2010 election there seemed to be a dissatisfied taste in a lot of people's (read: "nerd's") mouths about the limited application of social media in this campaign. The Gillard/Abbott camps seemed to apply social media as an afterthought, without any real sense of influence or excitement about the medium.

It seems politicians are yet to wake up to the digital tools they have at their disposal...

But that's about to change.

Last month when I was speaking in Melbourne at XMediaLab we began discussing convergence in social media, and what the landscape might look like in 2030. Wonderful technologies like facial recognition, predictive search, video tagging and geo-location tracking were all bandied about in a beautiful dream-like conversation. The future seemed so exciting and transparent with all forms of history on a global and hyper-local level at our fingertips.

But transparency and history are the enemy of politicians, who week after week are forced to resign as uncovered truths from the past or present are splashed across ever-widening social networks at ever increasing speeds.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt even came out last month and said:

"perhaps people should change their names upon reaching adulthood to eradicate the potentially reputation-damaging search records Google keeps"

Interesting tactic, but I think it is a realistic vision of the future.

In the election race of 2030, all the teenagers and twenty-somethings blindly posting and passing on their personal history will be around 40-50 years old - prime politician age! And oh how that will come back to haunt them. Any photo you're in (from any point in history) will be automatically tagged by powerful facial recognition software. Even if your face is in a mask, in the shadows, side-on, you're not safe from the computing power of 2030 (which will be on average 64 times faster than 2010). It will analyse a database of locations that match the interior of the room and give the image or video a location. We can then search the corners of the web for blogs, posts, comments or any byte of information that connects to that time and place, and suddenly the world can be pieced together through the countless insignificant comments of a generation.

Essentially the vast pile of decades of tagged social media will provide the public with the drama it has sought in its election campaigns. A Stephanie Rice-esque tweet that may have gone unnoticed in 2010 will be there for all to see and judge when it's scooped up by smarter, more accurate search engines of the future.

The internet never forgets, and the hazy parts of its memory will only be focused and clarified as time and technology march on. This is certain to revolutionise our expectations of political figures, as well as provide some much-needed scandal and drama for the voting public in the years ahead.

Nano App Store?

With the release of the new touchscreen iPod Nano last week, it got me thinking if Apple has its sights on another app store (to compliment the iPad/iPhone stores) with Nano-specific apps?

It would make sense, given that the screen and shape are specific to the Nano, and the sort of apps would probably be more fitness-orientated than the bigger Apple products.

Apple has it in their interests to expand the reach of the app store as far as possible to capture more developer interests and to ensure no corner of the music market isn't left open to penetration by small companies.

I was interested to read the Nano doesn't run iOS, preferring a lighter, more simplified version of the multi-touch software specific for the device. I'll be interested to see how developers respond to this.

It's an interesting time for Apple as the competition begins to catch up on some of their flagship products. The need for innovation has never been greater, but I think this is a smart move by the company to expand their market for touch products, potentially opening up a new market for Nano-specific apps and solidifying their dominance in the music player market.

Old Spice - Funny & Smart

What a great week for social media! A real red-letter week that has changed the shape (and hopefully standard) of the social media landscape forever.

For those who chose to spend last week in Outback Chad, I'm talking about my good friends at Wieden + Kennedy and the success of their "Old Spice" campaign.

As Creative Director Iain Tait said:

We just brought a character to life using the social channels we all use every day. But we’ve also taken a loved character and created new episodic content in real time.

This amazing holistic media campaign shows that creating characters that people like, then providing opportunities for them to be immersed in their world is the way forward.

The power of the idea is still king. It's something we build our whole business on here at Radical Love, and it's wonderful to see it validated (even if it is by the competition) in well-thought, well-executed campaigns like this.

And that's what I think is so amazing about Old Spice. It's a fresh idea that doesn't play to the normal (and popular) social media stereotypes. There's no shocking moment to hook people in. There's no reference to old faithful memes like Starwars Kid or Tron Guy. This is a beautiful union of well-written, well-produced content that connected with people for its honesty, reality and transparency.

So well done Old Spice... and please know the certain influx of cheap ripoff campaigns won't spoil this wonderful moment in cyber-history.

Social Media - A Definition

One of the questions I get asked constantly when meeting with clients for the first time is for a concise definition of what exactly "social media" is, especially in the context of a marketing tool. Most people I bounce this question off at conferences or workshops fumble around between the academic "democritisation of information" and the schoolyard "Twitter and shit".

Personally, it's a question I'm still looking for answers on.

One of the better answers I've heard comes from a keynote given earlier this year by Shiv Singh, VP of Razorfish. He took self-described "social ecologist" Peter Drucker's classic business definition of "The purpose of a business is to create customers" and gave it a social media slant:

The purpose of a business is to create customers who create customers.

I really like the simple and effective imagery this quote gives to the purpose of social media from a brand or business standpoint. Although possibly over-simplistic from a business theory angle, the sentiment is right.

Thinking about it further, and in my deep desire to achieve a perfect definition on this, I think I've stumbled upon a new definition for business in the Information/Attention Age:

The purpose of a business is to create a community.

Brands can no longer look to satisfy or please the individual, and can no longer present themselves as a single, unified voice. Connecting with customers today involves being transparent and open to the people you're selling to and letting the consumer dictate the brand image.

To the old folk entrenched in the Old Media world it's a scary proposition, where brands were the core to which communities flocked. The future is the inverse, where brands must come to communities and earn their trust, respect, loyalty and advocacy through unique and engaging concepts.

In summary - it's an exciting time to be a consumer.

Goverment 2.0

It's always baffled me why governments and government agencies, the institutions that are meant to lead us and guide us, are always so far behind the curve when it comes to implementing social technology. Now, I'm not going to try and push any political agenda with this article, but I suppose I should just point out I'm usually surprised and scared of any person in a public political office that doesn't understand Twitter, Facebook, or blogging.

The thing that stops me tweeting my lament into despair at this point is that it's clear our governments want to embrace social media, they just need some guidance from the people below.

I was overjoyed a few months ago to hear the NSW Government had begun an initiative to push towards what American policy makers would call "Open Government" - creating a digital environment that is characterised by transparency, citizen participation, and collaboration.

A wonderful example of this is the State of Delaware (check out their website HERE). Their transition from treating government websites as a policy-preaching soapbox and converting it into a digital round table for conversation is a positive step in the right direction. Facebook, Twitter, RSS, YouTube... all the big players are there, ready to be consumed, shared and conversed about.

For me, this is the role of government embodied in a digital space and has implications and applications that are tangible, imminent, and indicate a paradigm shift for the way our local, state, and federal governments can connect with their voters using the internet.

The speed and spread of information possible today is invaluable to governments and residents alike. Beyond gimmick benefits like alerts on your mobile for when the Premier is in your suburb or an email when new health announcements are made, the power of clear and communal comment/feedback loops on government policy can only allow for better decision making and a more informed and engaged voting public.

One Small Film For A Man. One Giant Leap For Crowdsourcing.

The good people down at YouTube are on the road of pioneering social media once again, this time with a vision to make a complete UGC feature film.

The company has pulled in the big guns of Ridley Scott and Kevin MacDonald to turn the humble day of July 24th into the most visually documented day in the history of humanity. The project, titled Life In The Day, will premiere at Sundance next year and stream simultaneously on YouTube.

"I hope it will be something that will open people's eyes to the possibilities of user-generated film," Macdonald said. "Of course, it's a risk. It could be that I won't get anything interesting back. But I don't think that will be the case. I'm sure there will be some real gems, some real magic, which is what I'm looking for."

I think this is an interesting moment in the evolution of social media as the professional pantheon of Hollywood opens its doors to the idea that quality content can come from the untrained, unskilled everyday person. It's certainly a form of affirmation that the barriers to entry for filmmakers are nearly all but gone. To think you can get a credit on a Sundance-premiering Kevin MacDonald film for simply filming your morning breakfast is a concept inconceivable only five years ago.

The power of the social marketplace is starting to rumble the foundations of the big media players, and it's wonderful to see some people embracing the movement rather than fighting it in courtrooms.