The blog that refreshes: Coke joins the conversation

I noted last November that Coke was planning to launch a corporate blog. Well, here it is!

Looks like they’ve done a nice job, too. Clean layout, lots of graphics, design is well-integrated with the Coke brand. The content is mainly historical. A few facts from the press release:

• Phil Mooney, Coca-Cola archivist and resident historian, will serve as the blog’s primary author and will solicit questions and respond to reader comments;
• Content will include: New products and other marketing announcements, as well as a look at how this news fits into the context of Coca-Cola heritage and lore; future content will also include features on newly uncovered artifacts and the global phenomenon of Coke collecting;
• Readers will have many opportunities to engage in conversation: Open Q&As, submitting stories for publication, posting comments, guest blog opportunities and more “Coca-Cola Conversations” will feature photography and video of rare artifacts from the Coke archives, as well as content provided by readers.

Daily reading 01/30/2008

Guinness World Records Launches New Online Community – PRNewswire

1. This is going to be one cool social network.

2. This is gotta be one embarrassed PR firm. The URLs in the press release are missing an “n” and leads to a squatter site. The correct link is here.

Daily reading 01/29/2008

Facebook-based apps can now run on other sites – Computerworld, Jan. 28, 2008

Facebook’s apps community is one of its strongest selling points and anything it does to extend that franchise to other networks works to its advantage. It’s hard to say how much of a breakthrough this is, but it’s clearly a blocking tactic aimed at Google.

Daily reading 01/27/2008

Conversation Agent: Forget Influentials: in Viral Marketing, Context Matters – Conversation Agent, Jan. 18, 2008

tags: social_media_useful

• Valeria Maltoni analyzes recent work by Edelman to understand the dynamics of viral marketing. Conclusions: It’s the Network, Stupid. In other words, influence has less to do with individuals than with the patterns by which information is spread. Figuring that out will get you farther than understanding who are the top bloggers. Interesting stuff.
   - post by pgillin

Web Ink Now: The New Rules of Viral Marketing – free ebook!

tags: social_media_useful, viral_marketing

• David Meerman Scott has another winner with this short e-book about viral marketing. It’s already been downloaded 20,000 times and once you read it, you’ll know why. No obligation, no registration, just get it.
   - post by pgillin

Secret Websites, Coded Messages: The New World of Immersive Games – Wired, Dec. 20, 2007  Annotated

tags: social_media_useful, social_networks, viral_marketing

On February 10, 2007, the first night of Nine Inch Nails’ European tour,
T-shirts went on sale at a 19th-century Lisbon concert hall with what looked to be a printing error: Random letters in the tour schedule on the back seemed slightly boldfaced. Then a 27-year-old Lisbon photographer named Nuno Foros realized that, strung together, the boldface letters spelled “i am trying to believe.” Foros posted a photo of his T-shirt on the Spiral, the Nine Inch Nails fan forum. People started typing “iamtryingtobelieve.com” into their Web browsers. That led them to a site denouncing something called Parepin, a drug apparently introduced into the US water supply. Ostensibly, Parepin was an antidote to bioterror agents, but in reality, the page declared, it was part of a government plot to confuse and sedate citizens. Email sent to the site’s contact link generated a cryptic auto-response: “I’m drinking the water. So should you.” Online, fans worldwide debated what this had to do with Nine Inch Nails. A setup for the next album? Some kind of interactive game? Or what?

A few days later, on February 14, a woman named Sue was about to wash a different T-shirt, which she had bought at one of the Lisbon shows, when she noticed that the tour dates included several boldface digits. Fans quickly interpreted this as a Los Angeles telephone number. People who called it heard a recording of a newscaster announcing, “Presidential address: America is born again,” followed by a distorted snippet of what could only be a new Nine Inch Nails song. Then, a woman named Ana reported finding a USB flash drive
in a bathroom stall at the hall where the band had been playing. On the drive was a previously unreleased song, which she promptly uploaded. The metadata tag on the song contained a clue that led to a site
displaying a glowing wheat field, with the legend “America Is Born Again.” Clicking and dragging the mouse across the screen, however, revealed a much grimmer-looking site labeled “Another Version of the Truth.” Clicking on that led to a forum about acts of underground resistance.

But when the cricket sounds were run through a spectrograph, they yielded a series of blips that gradually resolved into a phone number in Cleveland, Ohio. People who dialed this number (and some 1.7 million did) heard a horrific recording from a mysterious organization called US Wiretap: a young woman on her cell phone at an underground nightclub, with shrieking and gunshots in the background, screaming hysterically that someone had come into the club and killed her friend and that the cops had locked everybody inside and she was going to die.

So he planted hints in the music — a few seconds recorded out of phase on “The Great Destroyer,” for instance. Played on a monaural device, the music briefly canceled itself out, leaving nothing except a barely audible voice saying something like “red horse vector.” At redhorsevector.net, players would find a top-secret report suggesting the source of the nightclub massacre — a weaponized virus called Red Horse that caused acute homicidal psychosis.

On April 13, all the players who had signed up at a subversive site called Open Source Resistance were invited to gather beneath a mural in Hollywood. Some of those who showed up were given cell phones and told to keep them on at all times. Five days later, the phones rang. The players were told to report to a parking lot, where they were loaded onto a ram-shackle bus with blacked-out windows.

The bus delivered them at twilight to what appeared to be an abandoned warehouse near some railroad tracks. Armed men patrolled the roof. The 50-odd players were led up a ramp and into a large, dark room where the leader of Open Source Resistance (actually an actor) gave a speech about the importance of making themselves heard. Then they were led through a maze of rooms and deposited in front of — a row of amps?

With the sudden crack of a drumbeat, Nine Inch Nails materialized onstage and broke into “The Beginning of the End,” a song they had never before played in the US. “This is the beginning,” Reznor intoned, as guitar chords strafed the room. He got out one, two, three, four more songs before the SWAT team arrived. Then, as flashing lights and flash bombs filled the room, men in riot gear stormed the stage. “Run for the bus!” someone yelled, and the players started sprinting. The bus sped them back to the parking lot and the cars that would take them safely home. But before they drove away, they were told they’d be contacted again.

Daily reading 01/25/2008

Scrabulous and the New Social Operating System: How Facebook Gave Birth to an Industry – Knowledge@Wharton  Annotated

tags: facebook, social_media_useful

As of late January 2008, more than half-a-million Facebook users play Scrabulous daily, with four times that number having added the application to their Facebook profiles. Because third-party developers can keep all the revenue they generate, the Agarwallas are currently pulling in about $25,000 a month from advertising, according to Jayant, resulting in a “decent profit” after expenses like hosting, labor and server costs. 

“I know so many venture capitalists and CEOs who play Scrabulous. It’s a new form of golf. Maybe you don’t have time to play nine holes, but you can socially interact and challenge one another via Scrabulous,” says Rumford, CEO of the Solana Beach, Calif.-based Gravitational Media and publisher of Facereviews.com, a review site for Facebook applications.  

“The main selling feature of Scrabulous for me is the fact I can play it within Facebook. If it was on an external site, I would have to search for my friends all over again, and I don’t think that would work, and I don’t think people would sign up for it.” 

A few major brands have made it big on Facebook, like Red Bull, the energy drink produced by Austria-based Red Bull GmbH, whose Facebook application “Roshambull” offers an online version of the classic children’s game “Rock-Scissors-Paper.”

Online dating is another area where big players are lagging. Like the Agarwalla brothers before the f8 launch, Cliff Lerner ran a website, in his case called Iamfreetonight.com, an online dating site owned by the Manhattan-based eTwine Holdings. After the Zuckerberg announcement in May, Lerner recalls, “We decided to stop working on Iamfreetonight.com for a couple of weeks in order to write a dating application for Facebook.” The result was an application called “Meet New People.” “In no time we had more users on the app than we had on the website. And we didn’t spend a dime on advertising the app — it was all viral.”

Why you should never give an unrehearsed demo to a journalist with a video

Scott Kirsner blogs about a disastrous live demo by an executive at Nuance Communications, one of the biggest players in speech recognition. The demo went so badly that the exec posted a follow-up on YouTube explaining what went wrong. A lot of reporters carry video cameras these days, so know what you’re doing before you agree to let them switch those devices on!

The press release evolves again

Maggie Fox’s Social Media Group, which is one of the most innovative boutique agencies specializing in new media marketing, has developed a new version of the Social Media Press Release (SMPR), which was pioneered by Shift Communications in 2006.

The SMPR differs substantially from the traditional press release, which is often long, detailed and inflexible. The new format emphasizes many points of entry, so that journalists and bloggers can pick and choose the information – and the media – that they wish to use. The latter point is important. With so many media outlets today using images, audio and video to tell a story, the traditional press release doesn’t meet their needs very well. The SMPR makes room for story-telling through whatever media the publisher wishes to use. It requires more work on the client end, but should result in much better results.

Another innovation in this new version is its use of popular back-end services like YouTube and Flickr to host content. This means that people can find the information through search engines as well as via the press release.

Maggie has made the template available for anyone to use under a Creative Commons license. She has a more detailed explanation here. Or you can just download the template in PDF format.

Daily reading 01/20/2008

ScrabbleWars: P For Piracy, Or E For Extra Exposure? – Media Post, Jan. 18, 2008

tags: facebook, social_media_useful

• Here’s an example of a corporation fumbling a viral marketing opportunity. Instead of taking advantage of the positive publicity that a knockoff Scrabble app has generated on Facebook, the company is threatening to sue! What a perfect opportunity to tap into buzz created by somebody else! What a dumb move by Hasbo!

  Other interesting facts cited in the story:
  “As with music or video, free exposure can be invaluable in building
  fans. In 2006, shortly after CBS made clips of TV shows available on
  YouTube, the network said that ratings increased. “The Late
  Show with David Letterman” drew 200,000 new viewers, a 5% increase,
  after CBS placed clips of the show on YouTube, while “The Late Late
  Show with Craig Ferguson” increased its viewership by 100,000, or 7%.”

   - post by pgillin

A welcome measure of relief in endless metrics debate

It has become almost cliché for media professionals to complain about the lack of measurement tools for new media campaigns. The Internet is the most measurable medium ever invented, yet marketers continue to squabble about which metrics are most meaningful.

So it was a pleasure to read Katie Paine’s newly released book, Measuring Public Relationships. Paine is one of the acknowledged gurus in this area, and her opinions command widespread respect. The reports and tools that her team produces on the Measures of Success website make it a must-bookmark for PR pros. In this compact (204 pages), readable book, Paine gives us her best stuff. After reading it, you’ll wonder what all the fuss was about.

Paine boils down the issues to a few key factors. Outputs are the results of publicity efforts, such as clips and blog mentions. Outtakes are how people think as a result of experiencing outputs. Outcomes are how their behavior changes. All are measurable, she argues, so once you decide what tools you’ll use to measure them, the rest is just execution.

As Paine works through the various audiences that PR people must satisfy – journalists, bloggers, event audiences, local constituents and even internal employees – she uses repetition to drive home the point that measurement is all about sweating a few basics. Decide who’s important, figure out how you want to measure the results of your actions, set baselines and benchmarks and choose measurement tools. Although there’s good advice on the pros and cons of various online metrics, this book isn’t about page views vs. unique visitors. It’s about choosing the right metrics for your situation and then applying them in a disciplined manner.

Measuring Public Relationships brings welcome clarity to a debate that has become bogged down in complexity and minutiae. Read it and then pass it along to your boss.

My Facebook foul-up

Take a look at the image below. Is this the type of photo you’d want to put beside a serious business inquiry? I wouldn’t. But I did.

It was an embarrassing experience, and perhaps my mistake can serve as a lesson for anyone who’s considering using social networks to transact business.

Last week was the first time I’ve used Facebook to direct a professional inquiry to a group of my friends. I was looking for some active Facebook users to profile in a book I’m writing, so it seemed a natural place to find them. I used a third-party application called FunWall, which is made by Slide. It looked straightforward enough: type the question, post it and then e-mail a notification to a list of your friends.

So I posted my question and send an invitation to everyone on my friends list, some 225 people. A couple of hours later, my wife sent me an instant message questioning the appropriateness of the image on my FunWall. “What image?” I said. I quickly logged on to Facebook and found my question next to the item below. There were already a couple of e-mails from friends questioning my good taste. I scrambled to delete the original message, which wasn’t all that intuitive, and to post an apology. I received a couple of more snickering responses from my associates, but have no idea how many people saw the offensive photo and thought I was serious.

As far as I can tell, the error occurred when I clicked the button to post my question, I inadvertently clicked the option just below it, which sent a postcard to accompany the question. For some unfathomable reason, the default postcard was the image below. I didn’t bother to check the post after I submitted it, and would probably not have even known of my error for hours unless my wife had pointed it out.

So shame on me for not double-checking my work. And shame on Slide for making it so easy for even an experienced user to make such a dumb mistake. If there are lessons, it’s that you should beware of the new breed of third-party apps that Facebook and other sites are accepting. And use that preview feature! You don’t want your best intentions undermined by a stupid user interface.

I’ll just go crawl back in my hole now…