I was sailing around the SLuniverse this evening, and found myself in the midst of a HUGE build. Someone is constructing a Nova class starship inside of Second Life – complete with blueprints, floorplans, etc. The attention to detail is AMAZING. Take a look:
With builds this high quality, machinema inside of SL is a no-brainer.
C.C. Chapman sent out a message (okay, more than one) about a contest and promotion he’s heading up for Coca-Cola, called Virtual Thirst. Submit an idea to the contest for a virtual vending machine to be built in Second Life, and if you win, you get flown out to San Francisco to be featured in the video of the making of the vending machine. From the official web site:
Imagine a world in which a simple vending machine could dispense – not Coca-Cola – but the ESSENCE of Coca-Cola: refreshment, joy, unity, experience… So throw away the box, your expectations and interpretations of what a Coke machine is. Think expansively about the possibilities for having fun and being part of a great experience. Show us your best ideas – what do you wish you could do or see in Second Life? Do not limit yourself to your own abilities to create objects inside of Second Life – find any way to express your idea and get it to us. Let us and the developers of Millions of US help you make them real in Second Life.
Incidentally, I have to wonder about the following rules for entering:
You may submit your idea in any of the following ways: – gift an object to us in Second Life – teleport your avatar to https://www.virtualthirst.com/launch and use the drop-box to gift us your object
– share a video in YouTube – visit https://www.youtube.com/virtualthirst and use the “Connect with VirtualThirst” function to send us a message and attach your uploaded video
– share an image/description with us in MySpace – visit https://www.myspace.com/virtualthirst and use “Send Message” to post your idea as a message to us
– US residents only can also e-mail us your idea – send an email to [email protected] with the subject line, “Virtual Thirst Entry” and attach your idea to the email. Please do not use the body of the email to describe your idea.
Why isn’t blog post in there anywhere?
Here’s the problem I have with the contest – and I’ll be frank, because as much as I want C.C.’s first major public project to succeed wildly, I think he’d be more disappointed if I didn’t speak my mind.
Coke’s idea of its brand is not my idea of its brand.
The essence of Coca-Cola to the company is “refreshment, joy, unity, experience”. For me, as a consumer of its products, Coke products fit the first to a greater or lesser degree, and the other three don’t apply. Coke’s brand to me is essentially a source of cold caffeine, as is Pepsi, and virtually any other soda manufacturer out there. It’s what I drink (usually diet) when coffee does not fit the bill. If you were to sit me down in a focus group and ask me what the brand makes me feel, it makes me feel somewhat energized (or at least less lethargic, as I usually have it after lunch), carbonated, occasionally burpy, and less thirsty. I don’t have a particularly strong attachment to the Coke brand, even though I really enjoy reading about the company’s history and its original recipe.
And yes, if Classic Coke were truly Classic Coke, a la Pemberton’s recipe, it’d be illegal in the US. Ah, cocawine!
Can I create an idea around Coke’s idea of its brand? Sure. But it’s not my idea of their brand, and in the age of the empowered consumer, my idea of their brand is more important than theirs. Why? Because my idea and feeling about their brand ultimately dictates whether or not I buy it, whether or not I recommend it. A virtual vending machine dispensing their brand ideal in Second Life will not make me more likely to choose their product over another’s – whose product is most readily available at a good price point at 1:30 PM on weekdays will most likely influence my purchase. Happily for the Coca-Cola company, the Student Loan Network has a contract with a local distributor that provides employees free Coke products at work.
Ultimately, Coke has fairly little brand equity with me – they’re a provider of beverages, and if I need or want a beverage, they certainly are in the running as a potential source, but they haven’t secured enough brand loyalty with me to make me automatically choose them over another product. They have brand recognition with me, of course, but that doesn’t necessarily translate into sales. What would improve my loyalty to their products? Not sure. I do know that when Pepsi ran its iTunes promotion a while back, I grabbed an awful lot of Pepsi products during the promotion, and I remember it, but since the promotion ended, I’ve defaulted back to convenience and cost as drivers of my purchases.
So, all that said, here’s my idea for the Virtual Thirst contest. It’s automatically invalid, I guess, because it’s being submitted via a non-approved way, but since I probably will be booked whenever the contest winning time is announced anyway, (if you can’t travel on the dates specified by the contest, you forfeit your prize, and my Google Calendar looks like my defrag map on my hard drive) here’s my idea for Coke’s view of its brand:
Build a vending machine that you step into and it shows you various types of Creative Commons licensed new media that have been tagged with the same qualities as Coke’s brand – refreshment, joy, unity, experience. As you experience each media type, you vote on whether you think the media fits with its tag. After a while, you’ll have a pool of Creative Commons media – photos, audio, video, music – that the community has voted as the most refreshing, the most joyful, the most unifying, the greatest experience.
Good luck with the project, C.C., and I hope that you get some truly wild ideas for thing to build in Second Life!
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MySpace Marketing in the Post-Bot Era
Hat tip to Social Ham for documenting what everyone knew was coming: MySpace cracking down on the providers of MySpace automation software. For MySpace, it’s a big step towards cleaning things up a little. For independent marketers and promoters, it’s the tragedy of the commons – the spammers effectively destroyed their own tools, and took a lot of tools away from people who were using them in relatively ethical ways. (i.e. Friend requests from bands who sound like bands you like…)
Of course, some bots will continue to function for a little while longer, until the next major code shift at MySpace. Some bots are open-source, meaning that independent developers savvy in the language the bots are written in will be able to adapt. For the most part, for the bands, promoters, marketers, and podcasts that don’t have the technical firepower to keep up with MySpace, this is pretty much the end of the line for MySpace marketing 1.0.
The big question now is – what’s next? What comes after the era of MySpace bots? Three guesses: arbitrage, hub concentration, and whore trains.
Arbitrage. There are already some outsourcing firms that offer to manage your MySpace profile for you, including friend requests and messages. Workers in labor markets overseas handle all of the mundane work of managing your profile manually, and you get billed a service fee. These services will probably start to take off, since there’s really no way to stop them – at the end of the day, it’s a human at the keyboard instead of a bot. The arbitrage is taking advantage of exceptionally cheap labor overseas to be able to bill at a reasonable price.
Hub concentration. Your profile will take a lot more work to market now if you don’t have access to automation tools, which means that marketing on MySpace will likely take on a more LinkedIn-style, where you endeavor to attract and befriend as many major hubs as you can – people with gazillions of friends.
Whore trains. Expect this relatively pointless pastime to suddenly become relevant again. Without automation tools, you’ll have to rely on friend of a friend networks, and whore trains are the fastest way to bridge networks quickly, at the cost of a friend base that is less relevant and focused.
Where’s the smart money? Refocus your efforts on your own destination site first, and add links to the relevant social networks as appropriate. The window of opportunity to use social networks themselves as promotional vehicles is closing rapidly, so extract the last value out of them that you can, and then use them as brand extenders, but not as lead generators.
Where’s the next big thing? Remember the conversation we had on Marketing Over Coffee. In the beginning, there was word of mouth at the market fair. Mass media brought mass marketing – advertising. Google brought us the Third Age of Advertising – search. Now we enter the Fourth Age, characterized by community and prediction. Community and prediction are two sides of the same coin – your database. We as marketers will live or die, profit or lose, flourish or flounder on our database, because as permission marketing gets tougher and tougher, we’ll need to mine our databases more carefully and more thoroughly, more humanly and more accurately. We’ll need to predict the needs of the people in our database, as well as use the data to predict the needs of new customers, and do it in a way that invites them into our community, and not just another row in the customers table.
Marketing 2.1 just had a fatal error. Time for a service pack to Marketing 2.2. Are you ready?
Ever heard of these two drugs? Pseudoephedrine and Phenylephrine. One is a vasoconstrictor, the other a vasopressor. One is a precursor chemical used to manufacture methamphetamines, and that’s where the trouble begins.
A bit of history: pseudoephedrine has been used for years as a nasal decongestant. It’s effective in temporarily relieving congestion and stuffiness, and works well for a lot of people. Unfortunately for pseudoephedrine, it can be reduced using a variety of chemical methods to form methamphetamine, a potent, addictive drug. As a result, legislation passed in 2005 has restricted the sale of pseudoephedrine, and many retailers, drug manufacturers, and distributors have substituted phenylephrine in their cold remedies.
What’s the problem with this? At least for me, and for others, phenylephrine is ineffective as a decongestant. I’ve tried it a number of times, and it has no effect whatsoever on me. Why? According to Wikipedia and subsequent sources, phenylephrine doesn’t activate a norephedrine response in the body, and is metabolized by monoamine oxidase through ingestion, with up to 2/3 of the drug being broken down before it gets into the body. The net effect? Phenylephrine doesn’t clear a stuffy nose for me, making it a waste of money.
So here’s the question: does the public good of reducing the supply of pseudoephedrine for potential misuse outweigh the cost of a drug which has questionable effectiveness? Does the mitigation of potential criminal activity balance out with increased discomfort from illness?
If you buy a decongestant containing phenylephrine, don’t be surprised if it doesn’t have the same bang for the buck that pseudoephedrine-based decongestants did.
Side tip: even though it’s marketed for treatment of allergies, drugs like loratadine (marketed under the name Claritin) are also helpful for suppressing the histamine response for colds, and is effective for me against a stuffy nose. Disclosure: I work in student loans, not medicine or pharmacy. I have no expertise in this stuff at all besides what works for me – consult someone who’s actually qualified before self-treating with drugs.
Side tip 2: even though directions for making methamphetamine are readily available on the internet, I’d suggest taking a course or two in organic chemistry first. Using the directions available, you’re more likely to blow yourself up than make something that will give you a high. It’d be like giving you this set of directions for making a cake: flour, sugar, milk, eggs, water, cocoa powder. Mix and bake. Good luck actually getting a cake out of that.
… because even though this post is loan-related, it definitely doesn’t belong on the company’s web site.
Senator Charles Schumer, you’re an idiot. Specifically, you’re an idiot for proposing legislation that will provide a bailout for homeowners facing foreclosure, according to the Washington Post.
“We will be proposing significant amounts of dollars,” Schumer told reporters after being asked if a large federal bailout may be needed.
More from your colleagues:
“We’ve heard one heartbreaking story after another of borrowers with limited incomes being sold mortgages they could not afford,” Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, said at a briefing on Capitol Hill.
Full stop. Reality would like to have a word with you, then possibly bitchslap you. Unless a mortgage broker forged a signature on a loan document, the borrower signed for the mortgage. If they didn’t sign for it, then that’s fraud and they’re not liable for a penny of the debt. If they did sign it, but didn’t understand what they were signing, that’s not fraud, that’s stupidity.
Lesson the first: never sign something you don’t understand. Ever.
Sen. Christopher Dodd, D-Conn, said he would call for a summit on Capitol Hill soon “to try to work out a process for providing relief to homeowners.”
Senator Dodd, you’re added to the list of idiots.
Why? Because when you execute a bailout on bad debts, guess who gets the money? Not the homeowner. Not the poor grandmother and the other sob stories you’re trotting out. The banks get the money. You’re essentially proposing to funnel a billion or so dollars straight to the loan portfolios of Citibank, Wells Fargo, Chase Manhattan, and other lenders, and I’m sure they’re very happy with your idea. In fact, I’d be willing to wager that they’ll repay the favor with some campaign funds.
Wait, let’s go check.
CHARLES E. SCHUMER (D-NY) Top Industries The top industries supporting Charles E. Schumer are: 1 Securities & Investment 2,507,200 2 Lawyers/Law Firms2,009,721 3 Real Estate 1,529,498 4 Commercial Banks549,249 5 Misc Finance $534,248
And for some names…
CHARLES E. SCHUMER (D-NY) Top Contributors 1 JP Morgan Chase & Co 129,800 2 Merrill Lynch127,000 3 Bear Stearns 126,400 4 Citigroup Inc111,550 5 Morgan Stanley $109,500
I call bullshit on you and your bailout of your financiers. This is payola, plain and simple, disguised as an appeal to a middle class who won’t see a dollar of your proposed aid to them – but they’ll pay it out in higher taxes. What about you, Senator Dodd?
CHRISTOPHER J. DODD (D-CT) Top Industries The top industries supporting Christopher J. Dodd are: 1 Securities & Investment 1,552,013 2 Lawyers/Law Firms749,472 3 Insurance 697,458 4 Real Estate504,941 5 Commercial Banks $403,700
Again, I call bullshit, but let’s dig once more…
CHRISTOPHER J. DODD (D-CT) Top Contributors 1 Citigroup Inc 196,550 2 Bear Stearns186,350 3 United Technologies 157,950 4 American International Group121,378 5 St Paul Travelers Companies $105,800
Nice to see your legislation will fatten the profits of your supporters at the expense of my wallet.
Go take a long walk off a short pier. If you ever wondered why America doesn’t trust you, this is why. Payola sucks, no matter how you slice it. I swear, I’m going to find that C-SPAN video of your speech on the Senate floor and put a big-ass “This appeal for more government misuse of tax dollars is brought you you by these fine banks which would like some free money…”
Disgusting.
For those interested, these are my slide decks from 4 of the 6 sessions I did at PodCamp NYC.
As per all things PodCamp, these are released under the Creative Commons 3.0 US by-nc-sa license.
A few people asked me why I presented so much at PodCamp NYC. Here’s the simplest reason: I get too comfortable. By that, I mean it’s not only human nature, but very much in my own nature to hang out with people I know and enjoy being with. At an event like PodCamp, that’s bad. Very, very bad, because it means I’m not taking the opportunity to meet new people. My way around this, my mindhack if you will, is to do lots of sessions on different things and see who shows up, then meet them. Based on the sheer volume of emails in my inbox waiting for replies, I think the strategy is working. Hello to all of my new acquaintances and friends!
Action is all that matters.
The podcasting world has been obsessing about metrics lately, and I thought I’d pitch my two cents in as a podcaster whose show makes a fair bit of coin in the world of student loans. Here’s the rub:
Action is all that matters.
Forget audience size. Forget CPM, PPC, Adsense, and all of the monetization strategies that are being bantered around, because unless you’re already a highly successful web entrepreneur with a large web-based audience, these strategies will largely waste your time.
Why? Most advertising models are based on mass media. They’re holdovers from the radio and televison broadcast days, when there was no clickstream, no digital tracking. You slapped up a billboard in Times Square or ran an ad in the Washington Post, and they told you how many people roughly might see it, and charge you a rate based on those numnbers.
Those numbers are largely unhelpful. Why? Because podcasting is a high engagement, narrow band communications mechanism. If you want mass media audience sizes, then go work for the mass media and use the existing, established tools that work in mass media systems. Podcasting is not mass media – it’s niche media.
Here’s a question: if you sell Gulfstream airplanes and you want to reach your goal of selling one every two years (which will feed a family of four and house them VERY nicely), how many audience members in your podcast do you need? The answer is: one that buys a plane from you every two years. If you have 100,000 listeners or viewers and none of them buy a plane, you effectively have no audience for monetization purposes. If you have 5 listeners and one buys a plane from you every six months, you have all the audience you’ll ever need and then some.
Action is all that matters.
I sell the services of the Student Loan Network. That means that my audience listeners need to get connected with our services. If I have 100 listeners and 99 are customers, my podcast is a success. If I have 1,000,000 listeners and none are customers, my podcast is a failure.
What if you don’t sell airplanes or loans? Find something that fits your audience well and pays decently, and if you can’t find anything, either start a podcast in one of the industries that pays well, or find a different model to pay the bills and put food on the table. At PodCamp NYC, I mentioned during the marketing session that you already have over 10,000 advertisers at your disposal through affiliate programs, or pay-per-action. Instead of trying to sell artificial sweetener on a technology show, sell technology on a technology. It will better suit the needs of your audience, and will likely put more food on your table.
Why don’t content producers like the affiliate program model? Simple – it pushes the responsibility for sales to the content producer. If your program sucks, but you’re getting paid on impressions (CPM), then you will still possibly earn a few bucks. However, if you work in the affiliate model, your audience will likely never buy a product from you and you won’t make any money at all. That’s why advertisers are willing to pay more for affiliate programs versus other forms of advertising – the risk has been offloaded to the content producer.
Make a podcast that rocks the house. Make a podcast that inspires your audience to become a real community, to lend you their trust and appreciation, and then judiciously connect your community to products and services that are a great fit, and you will make frighteningly good money.
Action is all that matters.
