Social Media

Will crowdsourcing take off with Photosynth?

/ Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

As an amateur photographer I have been watching this Microsoft ‘lab’ project, talking it up since last year in fact, as an example of where crowdsourcing and visual communication could be headed.

Glad to note that it’s now open to us, the hoi polloi. You will need two small plug-ins for the site to work, and adhere to a code of conduct that includes abiding by intellectual property and privacy laws.

I can see how global and local events could be seen and reported.

OlympicSynth: Imagine if Photsynth pulled all the tens of thousands of images from amateurs and Pro-Ams at the 2008 Beijing Games via Flickr and Picasa. We would get a whole new perspective and in-depth look at events such as the disqualification of an athlete for stepping over the line, the tie breaker at a gymnastics final, the Free Tibet protests, the opening ceremony etc.

ReuterSynth: Could news organizations such as local TV stations and newspapers, even global ones such as the AP and the BBC create their own synths and let communities contribute to stories? Not a stretch since some of them are taking contributions from citizen journalists.

Internal CommsSynth: Organizations could let employees feed their intranets through Photosynth widgets to participate in company events.

iPhoneSynth: The widget for an iPhone plugin is just begging to happen, considering how iPhone / iPod users are sharing pictures anyway. Camera phones and digital cameras are waiting to be knitted together.

SecuritySynths. The FBI and SIS could easily pull together real-time synths of cities and buildings, subway systems etc when something on the scale of the London bombings occurs. If you the detail of people and architectural features possible on Photosynth demos (it can capture anything from a logo on a T-shirt to a pack of cigarettes in a piazza) it makes the controversial Google Street View maps quite tame.

Grainy, biased, poorly edited reports from Beijing complete picture

/ Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

Controversy demands source variety. The Olympics, like war, is poorer when the variety is constrained by commercial or political decree.

Jamaican sprint wonder Usain Bolt’ display of speed and celebration spurred much commentary –even a conspiracy theory about him slowing down. All this seems to make the official NBC coverage bland.

We also faced what I hope would be the last Olympics with a news blackout –messages like “Sorry, this media is not available in your territory” — from big (old) media outfits like the BBC, that is ironically doing a great  job of unfiltered reporting through new media.

Then there are plenty of citizen journalists in the village: athletes with cameras and blogs. GroundReports.com features some real street-level reporting complete with shaky camera, grainy video and poor audio. These reports don’t compete with the big guys but they sure add pressure for the media to rethink how it covers and keeps us informed about our world.

The Lenovo blogging program, Voices Of The Olympics, has been responsible for more than 1,300 athlete posts. “It isn’t really a program about making millions of impressions in the traditional marketing sense,” says Lenovo, but about those “thousands of connections between athletes and fans.”

Over at Bleacher Reports, another CitJo outfit that’s connected to FoxSports, a reporter called Zander Freund had this to say about the controversial tie-breaker between Nastia Liukin and He Kexin.

“If I were in charge of the IOC, I’d tell Liukin and Kexin to get their butts back up on those bars.”

Not exactly the way NBC’s Bob Costas would have put it, but it’s as authentic and grainy as you can get.

Time to rejigger the microsite

/ Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

Anyone who knows me knows how I make a big deal about microsites. The reason? Web sites are boooring, and way too static to engage me. (I really shouldn’t be saying this because I have a very static elder-statesman web site that I am too lazy to redesign.)

But I am talking of business web sites that are so full of the About-us stuff. Microsites, however break all the old rule of ‘stickiness’ and the default mode of information overload. But it’s about time to rejigger them because of the way our reading, search and navigation habits are going.

I am working with a crack team of designers on several microsites for some completed projects. My point is that I don’t want to simply knit up a project with a microsite, but create a structure for it to be a work in progress, a knowledge hub that is (a) never static like the parent site and (b) malleable and confident enough to have as many external links that are necessary, if it means rewarding visitors with content they may not have come across before in one place.

David Armano makes a few great suggestions on how to do this. His observation of the Lenovo (micro)site, which has been featured here many times, is spot on –that it doesn’t even scream microsite! His basic premise: build microsites that are more bloglike.

Why stop there? Why not bag traditional web site architecture and make web sites more bloglike?

The danger of exclusive sponsorship

/ Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

Most people don’t realize there is a hierarchy of advertisers at the Olympics. There are Exclusive Suppliers, Sponsors, Partners and Worldwide Partners. Coke is a Worldwide Partner, while Adidas is just a Partner! UPS is a Sponsor, Snickers is a Exclusive Supplier. As if that’s not enough there’s a lower tier of Games Suppliers. They all attempt to tie up the category they represent, by providing exclusive services to the athletes and visitors, and ultimately the larger global audience.

But I never realized how an exclusive sponsorship at the Olympics could be a bad strategic move.  Rohit Bhargava reports on how it has backfired for Visa:

“The incremental sales and revenue for Visa cards at the Games may be good, but the word of mouth generated for Visa at the world’s largest sporting event is nearly all negative.”

Wake-up call for “DOS-based’ PRSA

/ Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

My fellow blogger, Len Gutman at ValleyPRBlog is truly incensed by his profession’s approach to social media. I would have usually saved this quote for my Quotes of the week, but it’s too important to let it go. Here’s what Len says.

“The PRSA Web site is an embarrassment to the profession in terms of style and content. No social media strategy, no blogs, not even any discussion boards as far as I can tell. Is the site DOS-based?”

And here is the full post –I mean rant.

Dell’s Nomads grab rich marketing space

/ Angelo Fernando / 4 Comments

There’s a Digital Nomad in all of us.

The term came into currency with the book, and soon independent consultants were ditching their desks and cubes finding it convenient to work from “wherever.” Gas prices have been accelerating this trend too, with nomadic workers telecommuting a few days of the week or using Starbucks as their home office.

So Dell‘s move to own the term, albeit a bit late, is extremely smart. I see DigitalNomads.com as a business strategy to capture the mobile space that will ultimately be crowded by not just laptops, Blackberries, and iPhones, but by all the hybrid forms of connectivity we will adopt. Especially when ubiquitous computing gives way to invisible computing.

Not only does the web site connect people with a nomadic lifestyle, but it promotes a slew of connectivity tools and social groups. From Jott (one of my huge favorites) and Adobe Air to LinkedIn and Skype. It’s turning out to be a good place for discussion of the trend.

  • Shel Holtz, the archetypal digital nomad had added a lot more tools to the list.
  • Clint O’Connor considers the need for clear policies of freedom and security when an organization embraces ‘digital nomadity.’
  • Matt Jenson suggests that the term –and the role– of ‘Boss’ will give way to the role of the semi-authority figure, the ‘Mentor.’

Journalists, an endangered species. But do you care?

/ Angelo Fernando / 1 Comment

We pay scant attention to reporters and journalists who fight two survival wars today. The first, which we cover a lot is about job security, as newsrooms shrink and the ‘business’ of news gets downgraded to meet the wave of web 2.0 content creation and consumption.

But methinks we –myself included– focus too much on this.

We celebrate people who blog-slash-report to the point of turning them into celebrities. Robert Scoble with his camera phone in Davos, streaming live ‘news’ and the power of YouTube and Google in news distribution.

But I bet many of the following names mean nothing to my readers. John Ray, J. S. Tissainayagam, Levent Ozturk, Jill Carroll, Hisham Michwit Hamdan, Alan Johnston … Google them and see if you are interested.

Johnston was captured in Gaza, and freed last year. He had a campaign going, and now a Wikipdia entry, but Tissanayagam doesn’t get that kind of attention.

If you want to see what risk means watch this video taken this week as Turkish journalist Ozturk and his crew are fired at covering the Russian invasion of Georgia.

Tissanayagam, a former Sunday Times journalist, is being held on a flimsy ‘prevention of terrorism’ charge by the Sri Lankan government. OK, he has a statutory banner, and a web site; Reporters without borders has been campaigning for his release. But to much of the western media, these journalists are invisible, and those who consume news ignore them in the same way they don’t notice the bylines.

Tissanayagam wasn’t carrying a camera into the warzone. The ‘risky business’ he engaged in? Managing a web site. That’s right, my friends, he is the sort of new media journalist that doesn’t get covered by new media journalism. He’s 161 days in detention, and counting.

And we just go on covering China, and how investigative reporting is so risky in an era of slashed budgets.

Quotes for the week ending 16 August, 2008

/ Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

“One thing I love about Benetton: it never knows when to leave well enough alone.”

AdRants, commenting on Benetton which uses another controversial ad featuring a Tibetan monk and a Chinese soldier.

“The forecast? We’re smack dab in a cat five hurricane.”

Steve Rubel on “the thrill of the chase” as PR pros pitch publishers and bloggers, and why PR could be obsolete.

“Guys like Michael Phelps can roll out of bed in the morning in cutoffs and break the world record.”

Gary Hall Jr., on the controversy over the Speedo LZR Racer swimsuit, made of materials developed by NASA, which some say allows less talented swimmers to excel.

“I have no opinion on Tibet. I am a journalist.”

John Ray, ITN’s China correspondent overheard speaking to police officers as he was arrested, roughed up and being taken away after photographing a protest in Beijing, China.

“It sort of feels like the entire world is attending a huge party and NBC threw away our invite.”

Blogger, complaining about NBC delaying the broadcast of the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics to “maximise its audience.”

“People were in such a good mood all night, watching the ceremonies, smiling, drinking, laughing and taking pictures of fireworks with the enthusiasm of children.”

Mara Schiavocampo, correspondent for NBC Nightly News.

“In the meantime, the world has a new war.”

Brian Williams, commenting on his blog about the Soviet fighters in Georgia in the same week as the Olympics began in China.

“Pray for peace. Pray for the Bachman and McCutcheon families. For all of us.”

Sports columnist for the Arizona Republic, Dan Bickley, from Beijing, commenting on the senseless murder of Tod Bachman, the father of former U.S. Olympian in Beijing.

“That’s a fool’s errand — like the State Department spending untold millions trying to persuade Arabs and Muslims that they have us all wrong. As long as the U.S. policy toward Israel and the Palestinians is what it is — right or wrong — Arabs will resent us.”

Bob Garfield, commenting on Microsoft’s “Mojave Experiment” that tries to solve the pesky little problem it has over people’s negative perception of the Vista operating system.

Using Flickr to send a message

/ Angelo Fernando / 1 Comment

So you’re a photographer not a writer? How could you use social media to tell a story?

I came across this amazing series (via GreenDaily) by Dharmeshi in India. It looks like it was done for a campaign, but it could very well be he was trying to use his camera to take a stand about the environment, using a simple prop we run into every day.

And on Flickr, he’s able to send a message about what plastic looks like when its convenience factor wears out and it interferes with our lives.

Beijing Olympic Report: Branded Entertainment

/ Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

By amazing coincidence, I heard a bit of Rush Limbaugh this morning, philosophizing on the reason the Olympics attracts a female audience, and his theory was that the Olympics is a hugely ‘chickified’ event filled with stories of rags-to-riches and oppressed people overcoming the odds. They dig it not for the sports, but for the emotion, he went on. Limbaugh is famous for this kind of nonsense, but he’s going to feel vindicated because of how Kleenex plays into this angle.

I’ll leave it to Rohit Bhargava, my guest blogger from Beijing to take it from here.

If you are one of those people that gets in front of the television every evening with a box of tissues to get ready for the melodramatic overload that is the American television coverage of the Olympics, then you’ll be thrilled to know that as part of their sponsorship of the US Olympic team, Kleenex commissioned a documentary to take an inside look at some of the most powerful tear-jerking moments in the Olympics over the past few years. The film is mostly focused on the US (to match their sponsorship) and takes you on a hosted journey with a nameless host who plays the part of “good listener” as past and future hopeful US Olympic athletes are interviewed on a blue couch about their Olympic moments and aspirations.

I had the chance yesterday to go the film premiere at the USA House here in Beijing and it was a well attended affair with lots of recognizable US Olympians, including Julie Foudy, Scott Hamilton, Lenny Krayzelburg, and a few others (see my photos on Flickr). The venue was “homebase” for USOC team members and lots of American gear was available for sale. It was the perfect venue for the premiere and a well put together event. The film itself is a really nice piece of branded entertainment and does well to promote the role of Kleenex brand in the Olympics and in each of our lives, encouraging people to “let it out” without being overly branded. Great job by brand manager Anya Schmidt and the rest of the Kleenex team to keep the branding soft on this project.

I am a fan of Kleenex brand, but I do think that they have a larger strategic problem that likely won’t be solved by a campaign like this or even through an Olympic sponsorship. One of their biggest challenges surely must be the commoditization of their brand. The fact is, people call every kind of tissue a Kleenex. They own the category, but need to continually explain to people why it matters that you buy Kleenex instead of the cheaper store brand. Just once I would love to see them take the road of comparing their brand’s superiority to cheaper imitations. I can already picture the thirty second spot. Guy and girl on a first date go to see a sappy movie. Girl is crying and guy tries to be smooth by handing her a “Kleenex.” She blows her nose, the tissue rips and she messes up her expensive “first date dress.” The ad ends with her looking at him angrily as the tagline fades in: “Kleenex … Because Everything Else Blows.”

Damn, I’m good. I should do this for a living.

PS – Check out the trailer for the film below – its actually really good and will be premiering for a limited engagement in theaters in 25 cities starting August 13th across the US. It will also be available on www.letitout.com from August 14th.

To read more real athlete’s stories, visit Lenovo’s Voices of the Olympic Games!