Advercation = Advertising + Education

Woolly Mammoth Theatre has a show coming up about what you could learn about someone if they died and you found their cell phone. We decided that the best way to engage this on-the-go audience was to create a new kind of mobile campaign. Here’s what you do:

1) Text “get woolly” to 24421

2) You’ll get an SMS back…reply with “get fun”

3) You’ll get a call in number to record a message of something you’ve overheard (keep it rated R/PG-13 if possible)

4) If your msg is cool, we’ll post it to the www.deadmanscellphone.com and/or play it in the theatre prior/after the show.

There are some pretty funny messages up there already. Check it out [Dead Man’s Cell Phone]

On May 10th, 2007, I produced and co-hosted a Blattner Brunner Brand Energy Workshop entitled: “The Non-Profit Marketing Plan Walkthrough”. This session focused on teaching small non-profits how to think like marketers so they can connect with potential donors, volunteers and clients.

As a passionate alturist, I was happy to create the following doucment with the help of Mark Adams and Greater DC Cares.

Click the image to go to Scribd.com - a nifty document sharing site:

Direct link to The Non-Profit Marketing Plan Walkthrough

It’s interesting to put down roots in a place like Washington DC and to watch it evolve.

One important change is the birth of what could be called Silicon Hill - a city teaming with digitally armed influencers.

This month saw a few events worth mentioning that I hope will continue to grow in strength as the days go by. Here is a summary:

1) World Wide Web Washington (aka WWWW or The Four Ws)

Notes: The WWWW focused on…you guessed it…The Web. We were sponsors of the show [Blattner Brunner / BBDigital]. Somewhere between 250 and 350 folks showed up. Annual event.

2) Mobile Mondays - DC Chapter

Notes: If you want to talk about mobile applications this is the meet up for you.  Every 3rd Monday.

3) Social Media Club - DC Chapter

Notes: Always a good meetup.  Put entrepreneurs, social media hounds, agency folks and an IP lawyer or two together and you’ll get an interesting dialog going I promise…

4) DC Open Coffee

Notes: First meetup was last week and had a great turnout. Passionate entrepreneurs, startup junkies, internet strategists, and coffee….sweet.

5) Tech Cocktail - DC Chapter

Notes: Very well attended kick off event. Looking forward to the next one.

I’m sure I’ve missed some events. I’m trying to go to eveything all the time and that can be tough.

IF I MISSED SOMETHING PLEASE LEAVE A COMMENT.

Here a simple and fun way to hack a twitter badge:

1) Visit a Twitter profile you liked to hack.  Try Rudolph Giuliani’s Twitter or John Edward’s Twitter

2) Right click > View Source and grab this:

<a href=“http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/5672592.rss”>RSS Feed</a>

3) The 7 digits before the .rss is the User ID for Mr. Giuliani

4) Go to the Badges section and grab the following code to create a flash badge:

<div style=”width:176px;text-align:center”><embed src=”http://twitter.com/flash/twitter_badge.swf”  flashvars=”color1=52275&type=user&id=XXXXXXX”  quality=”high” width=”176″ height=”176″ name=”twitter_badge” align=”middle” allowScriptAccess=”always” wmode=”transparent” type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” pluginspage=”http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer” /><br><a style=”font-size: 10px; color: #00CC33; text-decoration: none” href=”http://twitter.com/RudolphGiuliani”>follow RudolphGiuliani at http://twitter.com</a></div>

5) Replace the “user&id=XXXXXXX” with “user&id=5672592″ or any other user id.

6) Post the new code to a blog/website and you’ll have created someone elses badge.  If you hack a bunch of these together you can create an odd “fly eye view” with windows (badges) constantly updating with tweets.  If you make something like this please comment…it would be cool to see.

MIT Technology Review has posted an incredibly insightful video of Tim Berners-Lee explaining the elements of the “Semantic Web”.

In summary -

Web 1.0 = A Web of Documents

Web 2.0 = A Social Web

Web 3.0 = A Web of Data

Click Tim’s Pic to watch the video

Thank you for inventing the web, sir!

What happens when Google is able to reach beyond the web and index other parts of our offline world?

I checked Google Analytics, and apparently Google’s search index thinks my blog is relevant to the keyword “Vineyard Vines marketing”. I’m not really sure why someone would find Advercation this way, but maybe Google is integrating a closet search and found a pastel tie and belt that I own by these guys.

Update: Oh, I forgot about the whole Smirnoff Tea Partay thing I wrote about a little while back.

Yes this is a silly silly idea, but we have to have fun now don’t we?

Frankly, I’m speechless.

I just saw a new BMW commercial on NBC that featured the “Nintendo 64 Kid” aka “N64 Kid”. The overly enthusiastic response to receiving an N64 console is used to elicit a connection with BMW’s holiday messaging: “remember when wishes came true, they still can”.

Anyhow, I’m interested in how this actually developed. Obviously, the N64 kid was uploaded to YouTube originally, but did YouTube broker this deal? Or did N64 kid’s handlers hook this up?

Anyone with info please comment.

Oh, my video blogger Plugin is screwing up. Until I fix it, check out the Original N64 Kid Video and the new BMW N64 Kid Video on YouTube directly.

It’s interesting to see how the definition of Advercation is evolving.

Check out this Ad Age article that references a recent Kaiser Family Foundation food marketing study that defines Advercation as basically pretending to educate kids while actually using the interaction to advertise to them.

The full report can be found here: It’s Child’s Play: Advergaming and the Online Marketing of Food to Children