Category Archives: alisa hansen
It Begins With Listening (To Keep Banging the Drum)
[click to view]
Reading over at WinExtra, a post which quotes from Chris Brogan’s blog:
“At this point in the gestation of social media we are still being led to believe that bigger is the way to go. We are being told that we should be joining not only the biggest and hottest of the services but also the newest. We need to make the services the drawing card for businesses and the conversations are secondary. It is like social media is WalMart and the services are just the different departments in the store that we shuttle between.”
If this is indeed what you have been hearing– fire your agency (or Web strategist or so-called Social Media consultant/guru).
No “social media”, just Web. Just conversation. Web strategy begins with listening, understanding your networks, and planning how to be useful to them. Conversation first, research first–Technologies come at the end of this process, not the beginning. You don’t decide to set up shop in Facebook without first understanding WHY (and when I hear this request to do so, my first reaction is to always pull the reigns waaaaaay back, and usually nix it all together).
At iCrossing we have created a robust process for mining and understanding Conversations, understanding those networks and planning how to be useful to them. “Social media” is not a silo, its swallowed up in overall strategy and therefore is intrinsic to service lines across the board– conversations become the center point of marketing, with strategy and engagement falling out of this point of view.
Reblog: A Stamen Project
I love the work of the SF-based Stamen group…and their latest proj is something all you Tumblrs might appreciate. Reblog is like your feed reader– only more useful because it allows you to not only consolidate your attention, but allows you to easily publish, or reblog (as familiar to Tumblrs or Twitterers with the “Retweet”) with one-click to your blog. Love this..Can we say streams?. As Stamen describes:
“Reblog makes the process of filtering and republishing content from many RSS feeds easy, and fast. Rebloggers subscribe to their favorite feeds, preview the content, and select their favorite posts. These posts are automatically published through their favorite blogging software, creating an attention funnel. Reblog’s “River of News” view, showing most recent entries from all subscribed feeds.
Instead of visiting dozens of websites, each with new stories and updates published in local formats, RSS syndication places all that information in a simplified, standard format, allowing users to hand off the grunt work of looking for information to the computer, where it belongs.
Consumers of information are then free to interpret this information how they wish. Reblog short-circuits the gap between “This is cool!” and “I just told the world,” by making publishing to your own curated feed or another blog a one-click process.
Reblog is an open-source collaborative project with Eyebeam, an interactive research and development group based in New York City.”
Go get one of your own / Discuss Reblog.
RE: The Doghouse, Some Feedback
David Deal, VP of Marketing at Razorfish was kind enough to clarify Razorfish’s involvement in the JC Penney-Facebook Connect initiative that I so roundly trashed yesterday. (Note: yes, I’m aware at how supremely contrarian and bratty I can be, my apologies…somedays are more so than others).
In a comment on that same post David notes:
To clarify: although Razorfish executed the media buy for the project, the social media idea and creative execution did not come from Razorfish — David Deal, vice president of marketing, Razorfish.
And again, my main lament about this JCP-FBC initiative is that I believe the implementation of FBC is missing its full potential. I just hope to see some more innovative uses of FBC in the future that don’t pigeon hole it into specific campaigns…I’m interested in what impact FBC can have on a brand’s overall digital strategy.
Data Portability Workgroup, A Quick Reminder
Just a little reminder of who’s participating in the Open dialogue
DataPortability – Join The Conversation from Smashcut on Vimeo.
Love Me Some Facebook Geo-Data Viz
Project Palantir
“You know what a palantir is, right? It’s the crystal ball thingy from Lord of the Rings – Saruman and Sauron’s favorite toy. Well, now it’s also a real-time visual representation of the actions happening on Facebook, and boy it looks pretty! It uses geo data to show where on Earth things are happening; you can see stuff like users making new friends, or just overall actions and interactions on the site. What warms our geeky hearts the most is the fact that they even included our Sun which is visible as you zoom out and scroll around the globe.”
[via arnsteinblogg 2.0]
Ad Men Douche Baggery At its Finest: And A Wasted Facebook Connect Moment
Sooooo….looks like douche baggery is still alive and well in the land of digi marketing, hooray! Looks like the kids over at Razorfish had this super neat idea about creating a “doghouse” that women could put their significant others in unless they buy them…diamonds! Oh, Raz, you know us women oh so well (blah). The recently launched “Beware of the Doghouse” campaign for JC Penney is, according to the press release:
“A viral marketing campaign that allows women to put their significant other in the “Doghouse” for bad gift choices this holiday season. This new site and the marketing campaign behind it provide a fun, interactive way for women to encourage the men they love to get out of the “Doghouse,” by purchasing affordable diamond gifts from The Jewelry Store inside JCPenney. Launching today, the campaign is one of the first marketing sites to use the new Facebook Connect application, allowing visitors to easily put their Facebook Friends in the “Doghouse.”
Not only is the premise of the campaign utterly ridiculous and condescending–but at its center is what else…a microsite! A microsite, oh why didn’t we think of that before?! Ah, but wait, it gets better. They implemented Facebook Connect. Now, you’d think I’d be pretty excited about it as I’ve been covering FBC since it was first announced back in May of this year…ah, but marketers never fail me. So did they do something useful with the FBC implementation? No! They created this lame microsite and a game by which chicks can put their dudes in a doghouse and do so via Facebook Connect. So, you chose to use FBC to let girls pick Facebook friends/bf’s into some lame doghouse? Because that is super useful and makes much more sense than say, integrating FBC into the JC Penney online shopping experience and thereby including friend data (purchases, wishlists, etc) into the product merchandising model. No, that just makes too much sense. We’ll just stick with this awesome Doghouse thing…sweet!
What a wasted opportunity to really do something compelling with FBC, and to explore the potential of data portability and its impact on user experience, and in the retail case, impact on sales (well, in the case of FBC, data portability on training wheels, but whatever). I’m afraid of FBC becoming yet another poorly handled FB initative. FAIL!
Decentralized, Distributed Social Web
Could not have said it better myself.
Data Ubiquity