Advercation = Advertising + Education

Crappy plastic platform? Check.
Flimsy rubber band to secure laptop (covering track pad)? Check.
Super sophisticated WIFI detector? Check.

Worst tech product commercial in history? Check Check Check!

This week 275 authors submitted their individual chapters for Why Don’t They Get It, a follow up to The Age of Conversation. (All proceeds go to Variety, The Children’s Charity.)

Last year I wrote a chapter on how brand marketers should approach using social media for marketing purposes.

Since that time, I launched my own agency, iStrategyLabs, which focuses on providing clients with interactive strategy (the “iStrategy part”) and digital/physical productions (the “Labs” part).

So, in keeping with iStrategyLabs focus, I contributed a chapter called “Four Principles for Fusing Experiential Marketing and Social Media”. It is my firm belief that interactive channels are rapidly burning out. Think about it this way: how many websites can you visit? How many banners can you click? How many RSS feeds can you follow? Here is a small piece of one of the principles:

The Creation Principle: Experiential marketing is employed by brands to drive deep engagement with an audience in a physical place. However, event producers must think beyond how the offline audience will interact with the brand so that they can build experiences for the online audience as well.

• Structure your talent agreements so the audience is allowed to capture content.
• Allow all cameras onsite. Video and photos shot by your audience will be uploaded to social networks and used in blog posts.

In this increasingly cluttered digital environment marketers need to marry the online and offline worlds to have authentic and lasting conversations with their audiences - this is how marketing is done today. It’s not the future. It’s imperative to market this way NOW.

The book is currently being editing and will be published soon. When it is released I hope you will pick up a copy because, a) my chapter may provide some value to you, b) if not, one of the other 274 could and c) in the worst case you will have contributed to a good cause as all profits are donated.

I look forward to reading the chapters of my fellow authors, especially those by friends:

C.C. Chapman, Ernie Mosteller, Joe Talbott, Jonathan Trenn, Laura Fitton, and Sam Huleatt

You can find out more about the other wonderful authors after the break: Read the rest of this entry »

In this new frontier of social media marketing, some brands know how to harness what’s out there. Others are like lost puppies nipping at every mailman that walks by for potentially encroaching on their brand’s territory.

Under Armour is a brand that gets it.

A few months ago I wrote a post on my agency site (iStrategyLabs), about a Facebook Page experiment I was conducting. I secured a number of branded Facebook Pages, and sat back silently watching the fan bases grow.

In my post, I said:

If you’re a brand manager for any of the above, just drop me a line and I’ll coordinate with Facebook to hand you over control of the page. This exercise was not built in order to squat on these pages permanently and it would be silly to delete them at the end of this as the fan base would be disbanded by that action doing more harm than good in my opinion.

So, I got an email from Nate an Interactive Art Director at Under Armour, and he appreciated my brand evangelism and willingness to hand over the fan base (~1200 or so fans). I did so, and Under Armour was kind enough to send me a bag full of sweet gear. You can join their page here.

So, thank you Nate/Under Armour. I look forward to seeing more great campaign from you guys. I shall remain one of your loyal brand evangelists.

I use lots of web apps. I build them for clients, I try them for fun, and use them for getting stuff done in life in general.

Most of them though I’ll log into once, poke around, and then never come back to. Some become an integral part of my daily life (twitter, facebook, workstreamr, etc.).

And it’s really not often that a new web app comes along that joins this revered list. Well, I think another just did: TokBox.

In a nut shell, TokBox lets you send video voice mails and have unlimited participant video conference calls (I got up to about 13 people simultaneously today). Oh, and it’s entirely browser based, free, and embedable.

Today Leora and I were chatting and I enjoyed the ease of initiating a video call by her just clicking on my tokbox link (http://www.tokbox.com/corbett3000):

I then threw my link over to Leslie on google chat so that she could call me…once she did, hit the ‘merge call’ button and she joined our video chat:

We then tried out the Conference Call function, and you can see below we’ve got 5 video conference users (Zvi and Sam joined) and one voice only (our friend didn’t have a camera). You’re able to join a conference call by simple clicking a link…you can see ours to the left of the headshots below.

Then a few of us tweeted the conference link and a bunch of people showed up (the black boxes/voice only are people configuring their cameras):

Tokbox is in beta at the moment, and I’m happily providing feedback as an ‘interested user’, so if you’ve used the tool and have something to say, please leave a comment here!

So, a new parody social networking site launched today called ncludr. I think it might be a self promotional campaign for the digital agency nclud in here in DC.  If it is, good work guys. If not, I’m interested to see who steps forward as the creator of this socnet - it’s pretty funny…check it out here:

The most interesting part about it is that there doesn’t seem to be any kind of payoff just yet…

The only link out of the site seems to be to OnGuardOnline.gov

If this is a campaign to pimp a government watch dog agency….then wow. Cool way to kick off. Let see if you get any further traction.

Thank you to Skeevis for the heads up.

I’m a marketer. Yep. I admit it. My profession is right up there with Dentists and Lawyers in terms of the public’s favorite job types. I typically dismiss the ‘evils’ of marketing and advertising, but every once in while something grabs my attention: witness below the underhanded subliminal advertising Marlboro subjects Spring Breakers to in Mexico.

I only noticed this while on a client shoot down there by pure chance (no, I wasn’t in the club shooting Girls Gone Wild)…and the subliminal ad caught my eye for maybe a hair longer than Marlboro would have hoped. My video camera caught the rest…Anyone know if this is illegal?

Dan Beyer of the Washington Post’s “The Washbiz Blog” recently covered the MashMeet Remix DC party in an article titled “A Celebrite, a Party, and Web 2.0″ . While the sponsors, organizers and others mentioned in the article are undoubtedly grateful for the coverage, there have been rumblings from a number of folks in the DC tech community regarding the WaPo’s continued inability to dig deep into this ’scene’ and understand what is really going on. I have pasted my comment to the article below, which gives a quick insight into what I, and a number of others, believe is the true nature of this market:

Dan, I think it’s great that the hometown paper of record is starting to see/cover the fruits of what the extensive tech community here in DC has been working on. What we have not been working on though is “trying to build a Web 2.0 community for more than a year” nor have we been “trying to show that D.C. can be, if not Silicon Valley, a major presence for social networking Web sites, user generated content and cutting-edge Web apps.”

What we are actually doing is BEING the change that you see in technology today. There are no aspirations here in DC to be the valley, or to be a community. WE ARE a very tight nit community of intelligent, passionate and driven individuals effecting the digital sphere nationally and internationally and love DC’s tech scene for what it is – a kickass crowd of folks that are as good at what they do as people in other leading tech meccas.

I’m sorry we didn’t get a chance to meet at the event, and I look forward to meeting you at some point soon. Thank you for covering mashmeet remix dc and the other events we find so crucial to DC’s continued success as a vibrant tech community.

Peter Corbett
www.istrategylabs.com

Facebook’s “Social Ads” initiative is supposed to create an environment where advertising exists as user initiated product endorsements. Their first push was with Facebook Beacon, which received heavy negative press and significant user backlash.

Today I saw the second instance of Social Ads; my friend Andrew Hyde popped up as a banner add endorsing Union Square Ventures:

I haven’t tested this campaign method myself yet, but I have to say that it’s pretty creepy to see Andrew pimping Union Square Ventures. Is this really the future of advertising?

Back in the summer of 2007 I had the opportunity to co-author Age of Conversation, which went on to raise thousands of dollars for the  Variety, the Children’s Charity by donating all profits to that cause. 101 authors got together to provide insight into social media strategy for this book, while raising funds to help children. Win-win right?

Well, the win-win-win here is that we’re doing it again!  Drew McLellan recently announced a call for authors on his blog and we’re in the process of selecting a new topic.

Stay tuned!

This Friday and Saturday I co-organized/hosted WidgetDevCamp at Blattner Brunner here in DC.

We explored all things widget related, built applications, and bounced ideas off of some of the brightest minds in the digital space in DC.

A link to the PDF of my presentation is here:

Other presentations will be up on the wiki shortly HERE.

A quick Seemic video of the event is here:

Thank you to our organizers:

• Justin Thorp
• Will Meyer
• Ralph Sklarew
• Peter Corbett
• Jesse Thomas
• Robert Neelbauer

And a very special thank you to our sponsors who made this event possible: