Advercation = Advertising + Education

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 »

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.

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:

In May ‘07 I posted here about how Washington DC is waking up to interactive.

The scene here has been pretty intense lately and last week’s event was a highlight of recently happenings:

Facebook Developer Garage DC was brought to town by Jesse Thomas, Nick O’Neill and Robert Neel.

Sponsors included EdelmanPR, and freewebs. iStrategyLabs threw in a live stream session which can be found here:

DC Startup Weekend is the next big thing coming up and I’ll be providing the live stream, some interactive marketing and interactive strategy components.

Will Kern posted on his blog recently about how he feels a groundswell of activity in the DC interactive scene. I’ve felt this for sometime too, and I feel we’ve reach a tipping point. There are plans underway to create an overarching organization that can help facilitate the growth of the broader DC tech community by helping solidify event sponsorships, simplify meeting logistics and create cross pollination among affinity groups.

Some folks might feel we’re ‘trying to replicate silicon valley’ here in DC - that’s not the mission, nor do we wish we were in the valley. We love DC and are working hard to support all the talented technologists in the area, enabling them to achieve what they seek. We’re currently brainstorming a brand name that we all can be proud to support and one that would serve as an appropriate umbrella organization. The naming thread is in The DC Technology ning socnet and can be found here. Special thanks to Justin Thorp for putting up the ning community.

Look out for WidgetDevCamp coming to DC on 11/15.

You maybe be aware of the interesting web app Tokbox that enables you to embed video chat anywhere you like. TechCrunch posted a nice writeup here.

Let’s try a little experiment. Throw your embed code in the comments section of this post, and i’ll create a montage of all known TokBox users on one page.

Your code will look like this:

<object type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” data=”http://www.tokbox.com/f/7oyiuFrZU0″ width=”425″ height=”210″ etc. etc. etc. etc.

The important part is your unique user ID…the “7oyiuFrZU0” you see above is the user ID. Once I get a few of these from you all I’ll create a page where you can see others wh0 are available for chat. Imagine seeing 1000 streaming video faces ready to chat! READY? GO!

UPDATE: The TokBoxers Experiments Page is up: http://www.advercation.com/experiments/tokboxers.html

Please send more or friend request me on TokBox.