WOM marketing, TwappyHour and Web414 meeting all help to explode myth of online social networks replacing “meatspace”

Mingling at a Business Marketing Association luncheon yesterday, outside the conference room with my fellow “Hello, my name is” attendees, I said something quite naive. I was chatting with a couple of our interns. Referring to the topic of the presentation, word-of-mouth (WOM) marketing, I said, “What we’re going to hear today will be far more relevant for you both than for people of my generation.”

My assumption was that the speaker would talk almost exclusively about using online social networks to generate WOM buzz. I couldn’t have been more wrong. The key case discussed by Spike Jones‘s excellent presentation was how his agency, promoting Fiscar scissors, identified those passionate about scrapbooking and fascilitated meet-ups.

True, there was a large social network component, complete with forums and blog posts. But once web-based connections were made, Spike’s agency created opportunities for scrapbooking enthusiasts to meet face-to-face. They met for weekends of shoptalk and bonding.

Social network tools simply acted as catalysts. They were, in essence, meatspace delivery systems.

Wikipedia defines meatspace as “referring to real life or the physical world … the opposite of cyberspace or virtual reality.”

 

Yes, We’re Digital Eggs — But We’re Also Flesh-and-Blood Chickens

Richard Dawkins, in his controversial articles, books and speeches, reminds us that all life beyond the simplest single-celled entities is digital. He put it like this: “You contain a trillion copies of a large, textual document written in a highly accurate, digital code, each copy as voluminous as a substantial book. I’m talking, of course, of the DNA in your cells.”

This genetic information reproduces itself more along the lines of a computer file making a copy of itself, rather than the way a photocopier reproduces off of itself. When you make a photocopy of a photocopy, very quickly things get grey and murky. With computer files, as with DNA, there is theoretically no information lost. Things replicate exactly (hard drive flaws and genetic mutuations notwithstanding).

In his book River Out of Eden, Dawkins helps to clear up that old chicken-and-egg conundrum. Sort of. He says we’re all fundamentally eggs (DNA), programmed to keep our species alive via reproduction. But here’s the rub: Eggs can’t reproduce unassisted. They need to grow into chickens. In this way, Dawkins contends that chickens are the eggs’ strategy for producing more eggs.

Thinking of our own flesh and blood as essentially a means to replicating our species’ string of digital information is something peolpe take several ways. They consider the paradigm either humbling, inspiring or alarming, depending on their theological perspective.

For some, in this networked age, Dawkin’s universe of pure information can be seductive. We can sometimes forget that in this digital banquet of the computer-mediated communication, first and foremost, we’re mammals.

And we’re particularly pack-oriented mammals at that.

Online Social Networks Abet Meet-ups

If Spike’s presentation didn’t remind me of the importance of face-to-face meetings (and it was, after all, held at a physical banquet room), my evening certainly did. I left work for two more meet-ups — both made possible through online social networks.

First, I met a group of new and long-standing friends facilitated by Twitter. Appropriately, it was called a TwappyHour, a term coined by organizer Augie Ray. It was a great way for me to put faces to Twitter “handles” I’d been communicating with for months. As Sam Dodge put it, “Meeting people this way after knowing them for so long online is pretty cool, but also kind of creepy.”

True enough. One thing that took away some of the oddness of it all was the atmosphere of our “Tweet-up.” It was The Iron Horse Hotel, a new boutique hotel at the foot of the 6th Street Bridge in Milwaukee, within wheelie distance of the new Harley Davidson Museum. Owner Tim Dixon gave this group of 20 or so Twitter-ers a tour of his amazing hotel.

The Iron Horse Hotel

I was particularly fascinated by Tim’s account of the rigorous market research he did as he planned his hotel, which is targeted to the surprisingly intersecting groups of motorcyclists and business people.

I’m looking forward to more of these TwappyHour sessions. Thank you again, Augie (and his lovely and charming wife Geri, owner of Metropawlis, for the discerning pet!) for making this amazing event possible.

After that, I headed to my first meeting of Web414, which was another demonstration of how computer-mediated communication still hasn’t replaced sitting together around a bowl of snacks. The topic was how to make the next BarCamp Milwaukee better. It was a fun introduction to both the group, and to the “meatspace”: Bucketworks. I’ll be returning to both often.

If I sound like a gushing gossip columnist as I recount my night, I can be excused. It’s all because I left both events exhilarated by the new friends I’d made, and with deepened connections to some existing ones. I’m forever grateful for the work I do, not because of the cool computing (although I would lie if I said that didn’t matter somewhat), but for the quality of the friendships and associations I’ve made through them.

To everyone with whom I shared this memorable night: I’ll see you online — and at future meet-ups.

Magazines learn Web 2.0 tricks

Five months after the American Society of Magazine Editors presented a National Magazine Award for general excellence to National Geographic and The New Yorker, it is what these publications are doing off the printed page that impresses me.

Three Ways Print Magazines Are Making Daring Online Plays

While retaining impressively high editorial standards, The New Yorker has found ways to leverage this content in ways that should attract a different breed of reader — or at least a newer generation.

The image below is a screen capture of a featured political cartoonist at work, creating a caricature for a story. Included on the same page are links to feeds for editorial content unique to the medium — podcasts and blogs.

(The magazine also publishs all print content online. I love how I can pass along by email a copy of an article I’ve read in the print edition of The New Yorker. Example: The South Korean film The Host (original title: Gwoemul) was one of my favorite films of last year, but few in my circle of friends and acquaintances knew about it. Anthony Lane, the bright and Wodehousean film reviewer for the magazine, described this film wonderfully in this New Yorker review. I’ve probably emailed that review to a dozen people, mostly because I find The Host brilliant, but also because Anthony Lane is such a persuasive salesman for the film.)

Another 2008 editorial award-winner, National Geographic, presents its stunning photography in a format that invites sharing. In fact, I had originally seen these photos (sampled below) in the print edition. Fellow blogger Lembit Kivisik had reminded me of them in a post on his Twitter feed. He commented to me that “I think about subscribing to the mag after visiting their site. Maybe I finally will now.”

And that’s the point, I think. Many of these magazines are flashing a little ankle, as it were, on the calculation that people will want an analog version of what they see digitally. (And who can argue that — unlike the online versions — the lush photographs and maps in National Geographic’s print edition are something to prize … to linger over and visit revisit often?)

Jozsef Szentpeteri's cool photos of colorful, bee-eating birds

And then there are the magazines using podcasts in a big way. My latest print Economist is a weekly treat (it’s sad, I know), but time being scarce, I appreciate their new service, Talking Issues. It allows print subscribers to download the latest issues as dozens of well-categorized and labeled podcasts. You get every word of their print edition. Now I get to “read” The Economist the way I would a spoken word book during my long commute into work.

Download the entire magazine in spoken word. Approximately 150 Mb per issue!

Do you have favorite examples of magazines making new media plays for our time and subscription dollars?

Does Disney know they’re being hijacked by Twitter spam?

Disney’s brand police are notoriously tough and vigilant. When they find a business using their name or images improperly, they take swift action. So I’m wondering how long it will take Disney to discover that some new arrivals to Twitter are pointing people to their web site under fault pretenses. In other cases, the same business (it appears) is inducing people to click on Disney-related Tweets, only to arrive at what appears to be a Google Adwords micro-site, or a site for an Orlando vacation package retailer.

It all started four days ago when, in quick succession, I discovered several new followers to my Twitter feed. I’m still not sure why I was chosen, since the newer of these entries are following only a handful of others. Unlike most new followers to my Twitter posts, these folks seemed to have no connection to my professional or personal interests. (Full disclosure: I’ve only visited a Disney property once, and that was this summer. The high point was learning to dance The Macarena. Fuller disclosure: I still do The Macarena quite badly.)

Suspicious New Twitter Followers

One of my new followers that day, Disney14, has — as the web site linked to its profile — this official Disney site: http://disney.videos.go.com. The URL contains a source code (CMJT), and a source ID number, both suggesting that the business behind Disney14 is part of an affiliate program Disney uses to get traffic to its video store. But traffic from this source arrives without knowledge that they’re clicking on a link to a Disney video merchant.

It appears from the text of these Tweets that the business behind them wants to show up on search results for the keywords used. Here are the most recent examples from yesterday (below this graphic is a text version, with the hypertext links preserved):

Click to visit Disney14 on Twitter

Here are the live links. Don’t worry, clicking on them won’t add to any SEO mojo. All of the links below, as in Twitter, have rel=”no follow” attributes that tell search engine spiders to ignore the links:

Within minutes of acquiring Disney14 as a follower, I also found destdisney on my list. This profile is associated with no web site, but every post lists the same Google Adwords micro-site trap, which itself uses the Disney brand in its domain name. Here are posts from yesterday:

Click to visit the destdisney Twitter profile

A third Twitter profile, sjohn1019, points every post (latest: “Safelite AutoGlass Contribution Grants Local Child’s Wish – MarketWatch“) to an Orlando vacation site. The site linked off of this Twitter profile is http://www.automaticwealthmaker.com, a “make money with Google Adwords” lead generation site. Which, incidentally, seems to have been cyber-vadalized by a hacker who changed “wealth-maker” to “wealth-taker.” Ah, the messy world of sleezy internet hucksters!

What do you make of all this? And how long will it take Disney to issue a cease and desist order against whomever is behind this Twitter spamming? Watch with me, won’t you?

99% of Amherst College’s first-year students pass on a land line

Recently Peter Schilling, Amherst College’s director of IT, posted interesting findings about his students technology preferences. Amherst is hardly a typical U.S. institution of higher learning. Located in western Massachusetts, Amherst is regarded one of the nation’s very best liberal arts colleges. However, Schilling’s findings do show the direction in which our college students are using technology and consuming media.

Some of the points Schilling made have to do with how quicky technology is being adopted, and how quickly old technology is being sloughed off. For instance, the number of first-year applicants applying online has jumped from 33% to 89% in just five years.

On the other hand, of the entire enrolled class of 2012, only five of the 438 first-years students (1.1%) registered a telephone land line. The portability of cell phones has clearly won hearts and minds. Similarly, notebook computers abound. Only 14 students of the class (4.3%) registered a desktop computer for use on the school network.

Here are other findings from the 30-point list that Schilling posted (these are direct quotes. I know point #5 is vague):

  1. Students in the class of 2012 who registered computers, IPhones, game consoles, etc. on the campus network by the end of the day on August 24th, the day they moved into their dorm rooms: 370 students registered 443 devices.
  2. The number of individual film titles in the College’s digital video streaming collection: 1,260.
  3. The number of times these films were watched last year: 20,662.
  4. Number that brought iPhones/iTouches: 93.
  5. Likelihood that a student with an iPhone/iTouch is in the class of 2012: approximately 1 in 2.

Web design turned on its side

We in the web design business often talk about what users see above the fold. The assumption is that people may not be compelled enough to browse down. But there are certain situations where the most suitable “browse” direction is sideways and not down. TheHorizontalWay.com is a collection of sites that turn our preconceptions on their ears. Of particular note among the collection is Interview Magazine, which uses the orientation for both novelty and to avert long load times.

The only downside of this approach that I can think of — aside from being slightly disorienting — is the mobile edition of a site would be difficult to maintain, since mobile pages are more traditionally vertical.

Can you think of other potential programs with a horizontal design?