The 30-second Old Spice commercial that features actor and former NFL player Isaiah Mustafa is wildy successful in the ranks of viral social media campaigns and within the ad industry itself, winning awards like the Film Grand Prix at the Cannes International Advertising Festival and Best in Show single commercial at the AICP Show.

On July 16, 2010 Shoot published Emmy Valued As Barometer of Entertainment, Representing A Perspective Outside The Traditional Ad Industry Awards Circle. Ad agency executives continued patting each other on the back:

“The Emmy nomination, though, quipped W+K creative directors Jason Bagley and Eric Baldwin, offers an extra dimension. “It’s the only award our parents know,” said Bagley. Baldwin added, “This was the first time my mom said she was proud of something I did professionally and really meant it.  She knows what an Emmy is.”

While the recognition from awards competitions has been a kick, Baldwin said that nothing beats “the excitement of doing work that people are enjoying and talking about. I can’t imagine any award being more exciting than that buzz and bringing the brand into everyday discussion. I’m much more interested in that.”
With tongue firmly planted in cheek, Bagley countered that by contrast he is “much more interested in the awards.”

In a more serious vein, Bagley and Baldwin credited the core creative W+K team of Craig Allen and Eric Kallman for coming up with the concept and the character in response to a brief containing a goal of talking to and connecting with women about their men’s body wash. “They both [Allen and Kallman] deserve major props,” said Baldwin.

But today’s news reports another side of this glowing success story, Old Spice sales drop 7%, despite hot ads. Speculation on why, is all over the charts from appealing to the wrong gender, to the simple fact that Old Spice is, well… old – “something grandpa used to wear.”

Watch the ad and then tell me the name of the product that you should be left with an irresistible craving to go out and buy. I had to do some key research to discover that the Old Spice product being advertised is called Red Zone After Hours Body Wash. If this 30-second tale is truly worthy of recognition as an advertising vehicle, then what does it successfully market?

The Primetime Commercial Emmy award winner will be announced at the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences’ Creative Arts Emmy ceremony on Saturday, Aug. 21, at the Nokia Theatre in Los Angeles.

China’s version of Twitter is Sina’s Weibo. Currently the leading microbloging site, Weibo is experiencing phenomenal growth since it started about 10 months ago. Weibo currently has approximately 10 million users, averaging to 1 million new users per month.

More celebrities in China are taking to microblogging to promote themselves. China Daily reports on Sina Weibo’s Top 10 celebrities. And here’s a comparison Twitter vs. Weibo: the most followed users.

Weibo has also indirectly received the official seal of approval from the Chinese government earlier this month by being mentioned in an official White Paper on the Internet -probably due to it’s strict compliance with certain dictates regarding censorship. Weibo can and will delete any comments that are politically critical of the government. A few Twitter-like services had emerged in China before Weibo. Predecessors that include Fanfou, Jiwai, Digu and Twitter were all banned in July, 2009 after ethnic unrest in Xinjiang was blamed, in part, on activists spreading their messages on the Web through Twitter.

It sounds like Weibo has a lot of great features that make it much more popular than Twitter will ever be in China. Much like Twitter in that you can post messages of 140 characters, each one is a word in Chinese so you can say much more – not to mention the fact that Chinese, by its very nature is a much more efficient language. Here are 7 other things Sina Microblog (Weibo) has that Twitter doesn’t.

If you’re really globally hip, there’s even a WordPress plugin that will  Get Your Sina Weibo feed and insert it into your WordPress blog.

Ushi is China’s LinkedIn…

Shanghai-based Ushi was founded by 100 Charter Members who are successful business leaders in China, including partners of the most famous VC firms, investment banks, law firms, and accounting firms, as well as CEOs of advertising agencies, luxury brands, and leading companies in Internet, mobile, renewable energy, travel, hotel, real estate and other industries. As such, Ushi aims to be China’s top platform for business networking, featuring the highest quality community and opening up the highest quality opportunities for members.

“At first, there were just eight of us that decided to get together every month to talk about how we were using social media and what worked and what didn’t,” says Abby Gutowski, Public Relations Manager at the Weidert Group in Appleton. “Now, these monthly social media breakfasts have grown to where we have sponsors and 60 to 80 people attending each meeting.”

That was 15 months ago when the New North Social Media Breakfast group (or #nnsmb for those who wish to track it on Twitter) was just beginning. Now, these business learning opportunities have garnered a large following and take place in a variety of different public venues, alternating between Appleton and Green Bay each month. The meetings are true-to-form with “wired” attendees at all levels of experience, posting streaming updates to Facebook and Twitter on their laptops and smart phones while the breakfast meetings are underway.

Stephen J. Kastner

“This is the ‘new model’ in action,” says Stephen Kastner, marketing consultant with DesignWise.Net…works. “Social media is all about spawning and participating in an authentic conversation. It’s a one-to-one-to-many discussion, where clients expect to get direct responses from business leaders. Businesses that pay attention by listening and responding to the continuously flowing thought stream in social media, will be rewarded with meaningful relationships and powerful loyalties.”

Kastner is one of a panel of four experts in the use of social media for marketing that will be speaking on the “Tourism Industry” – the topic of the next NNSMB, taking place in Appleton on Tuesday, June 15 from 8 – 9:30 am at the sponsoring Outagamie County Regional Airport’s (ATW) Public Safety Building.

Joining Kastner will be Kim Sipploa, Marketing Manager, ATW (@ATWairport), Trina Sankey, Senior Project Manager, Travel Guard (@TravelGuard and http://www.worldsunluckiesttraveler.com) and Dick Knapinski, Director of Corporate Communications, EAA (@EAAUpdate and http://www.eaa.org). They will explain how they utilize social media to connect with travelers, publicize events and increase revenue.

The New North Social Media Breakfast is provided to business professionals, both experienced and newcomers to social media, at no cost. Also, due to high interest, the New North Social Media Breakfast is implementing a new online RSVP system. To sign up for a breakfast, interested parties simply search “New North Social Media Breakfast” on EventBrite.com and order a free ticket.

The Breakfast was founded in March 2009 by Dana VanDen Heuvel of Marketing Savant in partnership with Weidert Group, Inc. and Element. The group, consisting of Fox Valley professionals, meets monthly to discuss how social media is impacting their businesses. More information can be found at The New North Social Media Breakfast Ning group at http://newnorthsmb.ning.com.

YourOpenBook.org says, “Facebook helps you connect and share with the people in your life. Whether you want to or not.”

Created by Will Moffat, Peter Burns and James Home, Your Open Book was developed to demonstrate what they feel is wrong with Facebook’s privacy settings… that they are hard to find and even harder to adjust. The developers of Your Open Book  are proposing the addition of a simple privacy slider to each user’s Facebook profile page and they have created this free search tool to call attention to their proposal.

Meanwhile, I think their application can also be used in lots of different ways to connect and communicate. But, it’s a lot like joining the dark side, when you start invading the privacy of strangers. Nonetheless, you might use it to search for mentions of a brand name, a restaurant or a geographic location. The possibilities are endless.

The Recent Searches on Your Open Book are updated continuously and display something like the following typical example:

(3900 per hour)muslim terrorist skydive nipple ocs alberta NSFW obama liar ottawa “i had an abortion” i hate my boss ecstasy nigger feet drunk doctorate program asian partyhot pics cute redhead crackers

Want to see what people share on Facebook with the entire world — perhaps without realizing it? There’s a new site that makes this easy, Openbook.

Consider just exactly what that means as you sit there with that remote in your hand, as you turn on the pop-up blocker in your browser, as you skip past the commercials with your Tivo and put your phone number on the no-call list.

Now, a business needs to develop and nurture meaningful relationships in order to make sales and these relationships must be authentic. The public has actually grown hostile towards old-school snake oil sales-techniques like green-washing. And once that door slams in your face, it is very unlikely that it will ever open again.

Providing a way of “opting out” of any e-mail list is now a legal mandate so your content has to be of genuine value. As a business communicator, your message is now continually under evaluation. And your only hope in this day and age is to be about something… real.

Doing good makes for good business. I am often accused of being too political, always speaking out about issues that affect me. There are two ways to approach this “condition” from a business perspective. One way is to try to present a well-crafted neutral “business face.” The other is to be honest and open about your beliefs and trust that you will attract as many people as you might “offend” by being about something that is possibly controversial.

Gilbreath says, “There are lots of compelling reasons why doing good makes good business sense, starting with an increase in sales.” He cites one 2008 behavioral research study that shows, “a whopping 87%  of consumers will switch from one brand to another that’s comparable based on its association with a good cause.”

Despite the fact that permission-based marketing may be a new concept to many,  Gilbreath says it’s so 1990’s – based on the theories of Seth Godin. Now it’s about Marketing with Meaning. If you are having a positive impact on people’s lives then, of course you will continue to be granted permission to co-exist in their social network. My next post will dig deeper as I read this great new book: The Next Evolution of Marketing.

Most of my clients are quite ill-informed when I ask them, “What is the second most popular search engine, right behind Google?” They seem incredulous when I reply,” It’s YouTube.”

Here’s the first video ever posted on YouTube, seen more than 2.5  million times in 5 years.

Today, as a birthday salute, the BBC reports the following YouTube statistics…

• December 2005 8 million videos watched a day
• January 2008 10 hours of video uploaded every minute
• October 2009 1 billion views per day
• March 2010 24 hours of video uploaded every minute
• May 2010…

YouTube hits 2bn daily downloads reports the BBC’s Maggie Shiels. She explains that TV remains in comparatively good shape when you compare average time spent on YouTube at 15 minutes vs TV’s 5 hours per day.

But, 15 minutes a day spent on any one Web site is quite a different story, one only out-performed by Facebook, currently clocking in at 55 minutes of average user-time per day. There are a wealth of statistics that demonstrate that video improves conversion rates, decreases returns, improves search optimization and even increases open-rates when embedded in e-mail!

We incorporate video production into all of our current client’s Web-marketing campaigns and the proof keeps coming in that having a broad social footprint – one that includes video – is key to reaching your audience. Does your marketing plan include having a YouTube Channel?

Links:

eCommerce Video Drives Conversion, Sales and Traffic While Reducing Returns reports on a wealth of documentedc statistics like…
Internet Retailer reports that visitors who view product videos are 85% more likely to buy than visitors who do not, based on OnlineGolf.com results. (Internet Retailer, April 2010)

Videos embedded in email can grab attention or cause deliverability problems and rendering nightmares. Most marketers believe the latter, but a few say their data speak otherwise. See how in 2008, a marketer increased conversions more than 50% by embedding video in emails. Includes deliverability and subject line test data. Plus, what’s the best video length to use.

That’s the scene in “Minority Report”, the 2002 futuristic thriller in which Tom Cruise’s character, John Anderson is walking through a shopping mall. With the help of contemporary advertisers like Guinness, Bulgari, Lexus, Reebok, Nokia, Pepsi-Cola’s Aquafina and a “think tank” of MIT futurists, director Steven Spielberg and production designer Alex McDowell painted a fascinating picture of what advertising might look like in 2054. Iris-recognition targets the advertisements directly to John Anderson’s personal preferences… just like Facebook, Google and Yahoo. The future is here now.

“Targeted advertising today is based entirely on keywords, but in the future it will be based on a deeper understanding of the specific personality, desires, and needs of each consumer,” says Ray Kurzweil.

Yahoo calls them “Interest-based Ads” – and now they give you the option of opting out of the behavioral targeting and categories that they have already opted you into.

On March 13, 2010 Facebook overtook Google as the world's number one Web site... and with an average user time of more than 55 minutes.

“If the 2000s was the Google decade, then the 2010s will be the Facebook decade,” says Steve Rubel, Director of Insights for Edelman Digital, a division of Edelman – the world’s largest independent PR firm. “As with the last 10 years, this era will unleash an avalanche of change for media companies and advertisers. You can see the writing on the wall, pun intended.”

Facebook already knows an incredible amount of each user’s highly specific demographic details, because users are continuously telling each other who they are. With more than 500 million users it has the audience and  the knowledge to sell targeted advertising that can pinpoint viewers by age, gender, special interests and a number of other selectable measures.

And… over 100 million of those FB users are accessing via handheld devices, Facebook will soon follow Twitter by adding location-based technologies to the mix.

“Location is Everything,” was once a maxim reserved exclusively for the real estate market;  now it’s about the Internet.

I predict that within a year SEO experts will rephrase British real estate developer Harold Samuel’s famous quote about property to say, “There are three things you need in regard to Search Engine Optimization, these are: location, location, and location.”

Advertising is undergoing a rapid and dramatic shift toward location-based targeting. Social networking services like BrightKite, Loopt, Foursquare and Gowalla provide users with GPS-aware devices, to check-in, rate and add tips that other users can reference when in unfamiliar territory.

“There’s a lot of attention being focused on location-based services and mobile social networks right now, and for good reason,” Sam Altman, Co-Founder and CEO of Loopt. “These applications represent the future of social media. They’re expanding our circle of friends online and offline. They’re changing how we meet people. They’re affecting where we go and why. They’re forging important connections between our online networks and real life.”

Altman tells the Wall Street Journal that he calls the set of all places that you go (and information about when you go, for how long, who with, etc.) your Life Graph. The rise in popularity of location-based social networking goes hand-in-hand with the ubiquity of hand-held devices like the Android, iPhone and Blackberry – smart phones that have the ability to determine a user’s current location by employing GPS or cellular tower triangulation.

Steve Rubel says, “Websites will become less important over time. They will be primarily transactional and/or utilitarian. Brands will shift more of their dollars and resources to creating a robust presence where people already are and figure out how to use them to build relationships.”

Here at DesignWise Studios we are continuing to shift with the times as evidenced by our own CMS-driven Web site… not to mention our focus on social media, video production and now, location-based technology. Here’s one last provocative question: Have you seen your own spectacular Web site as displayed on a hand held device? The experience might be chilling. Our design team is also tech-savy in that regard… Contact us if you are ready to enter the 21st century.

“Life is change. How it differs from the rocks.” – Jefferson Airplane

I was just working out various ways to add some of my missing Website feeds to Google Buzz when I came across this link… http://code.google.com/apis/socialgraph/. Google says, “We currently index the public Web for XHTML Friends Network (XFN), Friend of a Friend (FOAF) markup and other publicly declared connections. By supporting open Web standards for describing connections between people, web sites can add to the social infrastructure of the web.”

If you haven’t noticed the additional new XFN Link Relationship tagging provided within Wordpress Links… here’s what to start paying attention to:

XFN explains that they now help users put a human face on linking. “As more people have come online and begun to form social networks, services such as Technorati and Feedster have arisen in an attempt to show how the various nodes are connected. Such services are useful for discovering the mechanical connections between nodes, but they do not uncover the human relationships between the people responsible for the nodes.”

XFN’s new rel= attributes, now found within URL hyperlinks, helps to define a small set of values that describe personal relationships.

“XFN allows authors to indicate which of the weblogs they read belong to friends, whom they’ve physically met, and other personal relationships,” say the XFN developers. “Using XFN values, which can be listed in any order, people can humanize their blogrolls and links pages, both of which have become a common feature of weblogs.”

The new Google API will let developers do even more with these relationships so, it’s time to start filling in the blanks. Are you using the new Social Graph API yet? If so, please comment on how you find value in it.

The Android Market is an open service that lets you distribute your apps to any handset users. The Android Open Source Project gives developers complete access to the entire platform source code. The Android SDK provides tools, sample code and documentation needed to create whatever app you envision . You can create or update your existing development environment by installing the Android 2.1 platform as an SDK component. Except as noted, this content is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5.

Refer to the Android Developers blog for full information.Learn more about ADC 2.

Meanwhile, developers are becoming enraged at Apple’s recent wave of lockdowns and shutdowns… “Truly, this ‘draconion’ license agreement is just an extension of Apple’s control issues, exemplified by its closed system,” says Gavin Dunaway. “And having a closed system will eventually hobble it. There’s a reason why most people and businesses use PCs and not Macs — the former have far more flexibility because they’re open sourced. You can do a lot of neato personalization with OS X, but the limits on customization pale in comparison to a PC in terms of both software and hardware.”

“You may be able to do a lot with an iPhone, but due to Apple’s unwillingness to give some power to developers, you’ll eventually be able to do far more on its competitors.”

Android Dev Phones

Run and debug your Android applications directly on one of these devices. Modify and rebuild the Android operating system, and flash it onto the phone. The Android Dev Phones are carrier independent, and available for purchase by any developer registered with Android Market.

Learn more about the Android Dev Phones »

Maps API Key

If you’re writing an Android application that uses Google Maps (with MapView), you must register your application to obtain a Maps API Key. Without the key, your maps application will not work on Android devices. Obtaining a key requires just a couple of steps.

Learn more »

	Download The Android SDK has the tools, sample code, and docs you need to create great apps. Learn more »
	Publish Android Market is an open service that lets you distribute your apps to handsets. Learn more »
	Contribute Android Open Source Project gives you access to the entire platform source. Learn more »
	Target Devices The Device Dashboard provides information about deployed Android devices to help you target suitable device configurations as you build and update your apps. Learn more »

Ringdroid for Android 2.2 is a free ringtone app that lets you create tones, alarms, and notifications from MP3, WAV,AAC/MP4, 3GPP/AMR files you load onto your phone through the SD card or that you purchase through the Amazon MP3 store. Unlike many Android apps that use the Menu keys to store some software functions, most of Ringdroid’s controls are out on the interface and all respond to touch.

Introducing home screen widgets and the AppWidget framework

“You can easily add widgets into your existing app, and in this article I’ll walk through a quick example: writing a widget to show the Wiktionary “Word of the day.”

Today, I had an opportunity to sit in on a marketing pitch being delivered to one of my clients by a radio advertising salesman. I was there for an eventual meeting about the development of my own plan for an “integrated” advertising campaign – one that would include earned media in the form of traditional press releases, coupled with a strong emphasis on the rapidly emerging forms of social network media.

In that later meeting, I would provide the following quote from Sut Jhally, Professor of Communications at the University of Massachusetts and founder of the Media Education Foundation:

“Advertisers have to go to where the audience is… if they want to sell products. They have no option but to go where the audience has gone. If the audience has gone online, gone to iPods, gone to Facebook – wherever the audience has gone – that is where advertisers must go.”

As I listened to the “old-school” radio pitchman trying to encourage my client to buy his packages of “spots,” I envisioned the sharp changes that are sweeping over the worlds of journalism and marketing, as we transit from broadcast to networked media. I saw those radio spots floating away in the breeze like the dry seeds of a dandelion blossom…

Maybe they would land somewhere on favorable ground and sprout forth as a new plant. Most of them would simply blow away like dust in the wind.

I realized that I had come to help my client plant and grow a garden. That’s the profound difference between traditional broadcast media (radio, TV and newspaper advertising) and networked social media… In the old school, we continually threw out spots, hoping someone would eventually see or hear one. In the new school we intentionally plant and cultivate a growing presence in new media resources that remains and grows larger in size the more time we invest.

I am talking about new social media tools like:

• a blog-based Web site with an ongoing stream of fresh content,
• a well-crafted business presence on Facebook (500M members),
• a YouTube channel (2nd most popular search engine) with homespun videos,
• micro-blogging your message and joining in the conversation taking place on Twitter,
• learn about sites like FourSquare and the rapidly expanding dimension of location-based technology
• pay attention to public review forums like Trip Advisor, Yelp and others,
• take advantage of the free and ever-evolving set of Google’s gardener tools.

The difference is apparent… it’s no longer a question of “if“ you decide to employ new media. As newspapers shrink and disappear right before your eyes and radio audiences now listen to what they want on iPods and smart phones, it’s now a matter  of “when” you decide to plant that garden.

How does your garden grow?

Contact Social Media Consultant, Stephen Kastner to discuss the most effective ways to plant and grow your social media garden.