If You Build It...They Still Won't Come

Ready for this? Its 3:39am my time (EST) and I'm just lucid enough to type yet tired enough to quite possibly run myself into a hole here. I have to say, there is something trepidatious about straddling the edges of both the marketing and the tech 2.0 digirati sets: one is always behind the other. David Armano of Logic+Emotion, one of my favorite blogs, recently posted on how "micro sites are so 2007" and to "look for distributed content experiences in 2008." While I agree with our man Armano here, I feel a little cheeky in saying so-- but hello, aren't micro sites soooo like early 2006? (This is where I run into trouble as I know how attached NYC interactive ad agencies are to their micro sites). But back to Armano's post, which has some great suggestions for brands delving into the interactive community space-- but the issues I have always taken with brand publishing digital content, or trying to establish their own branded social network is that they do all tend to be, well, crappy no? I still think that at this point, it is still in a brand's best interest to leverage existing content platforms and to widgetize content instead of building a whole new container that must be populated with registrants and daily active users. Go to where your audience is-- don't make us lazy internet users come to you.

Has there been, thus far, a successful effort by a large brand to establish its own content/networking/distribution platform (ie: "branded social networking site")? If so, I would be interested in who and what the success metrics were.

Now, excuse the typos and I'm off to bed. This shall perhaps be revisited in the morning. Until then, widgetize!

Never Never Post at 3am

Well, I'm not about to, only to say that this may turn into a vlog. Yes, me talking about all the things I wish I had the patience to write after I've already verbally downloaded them in the conference room to David Weller. Some topics I've recently mused:

Coming soon, perhaps in video

Twitter/adoption curve
Technographics
The Open Movement and what it means for SMM
Viral vs. Vital Content
Best Pracitces/Case Study: Facebook
Best Practices/Case Study: Twitter
SMM Spend 2008/2009
Future of SMM (My Flash Freaks + PHP Geeks + SMM Maven Post)
Beyond Beacon/OpenSocial:The Giant Global Graph
2006: Year of the "Social Network," 2007: Year of the Widget, 2008: Year of...
Internet Memes
Web 2.0 is a Four Letter Word
The New Nu Marketer

MashMeet NYC

MashMeet was down at the PourHouse in the East Village Tuesday night. It was a lot of fun to go down with the girls from work, Jackie & Naomi, and to meet up with blogga friends. I managed to dodge the elevator pitches whilst engaged in conversation with bloja (thats blogga + ninja) friend Nicholas. Did get to meet Allen Stern which was great-- "I follow your Twitter" was the opener. Allen had pictures and a follow up of the shindig. Rounded out the night with a late sushi dinner...Jackie and Naomi are hilarious and had the whole table rolling. Good times!


Nicholas Carlson

Allen Stern, Adam Hirsch

musings: all under one roof

from a chat with nicholas:

alisamleo: and whats happening, what i think will happen, is
a gathering of flash creative interactive agencies, SEO, and social media strategists/evengelists/pr whatevsky, be housed under one roof.
interdisciplinary services with lots of crossover finally coming together...
evidence: google bought razorfish
etc..

Eddie Izzard has "Techno Joy!"

LOL...I LOVE this man, and glad I found this gem from one of his older shows circa 1996...

here goes another video post...happy holidays, enjoy!

social media infographics

[via infosthetics]

The Twitter Post

As I mentioned a month ago, there is indeed rich conversation in Twitter, and that its come close to replacing my Google reader somewhat. Now that Jeremiah has catapulted Twitter onto Techmeme, I find myself with the following thoughts on the matter: Twitter is awesome for nitty gritty conversation and chatter and, its rich with insight specific to the marketing, social media, and tech 2.0 communities. But Jeremiah is not the freaking god of Twitter! Scoble touted is as the new conversation space months ago. Anyway, this it not a rant on Jeremiah...but rather a look at the technographic and cultural shift that Twitter is experiencing right now. From launch until what seems like only a few months ago, Twitter was entirely the domain of the Early Adopter (and their friends). The "conversation," as it were, was primarily a smattering of randomnocity by kids out in Silicon Valley (OH @ Wb 2.0 Expo 2006: "Twitter is stupid, only SV people use it and its going to die on the vine").

About a month ago Scoble noted that the conversation had moved off blog comments and onto Twitter. Again, this would be primarily for the Early Adopter tech 2.0 set. After resurrecting my dormant feed from last April, I began noticing faces from the marketing 2.0 set...Lee Odden, Brian Solis, and of course, Jeremiah. Whats happened in the past month is a swell in numbers of this new kind of marketing pioneer and "social media strategists." The masturbatory chatter has shifted and Twitter has become my finger-to-the-pulse monitoring tool for this community specifically.

I predict (ah, the ever-doomed predictions) a continued swell over the next few months as Twitter enters the Early Majority adoption phase. We'll begin to see more Twitter status' popping up on Facebook profiles of the marketing set, there'll be a flourish of (even more) 3rd party apps, new "best practices" and blog posts..oh yes! the blog posts and panels and presentations of "how to leverage Twitter"...and critical mass will loom in the horizon as Early Majority turns to Late Majority...and as Pownce becomes the new drug of choice for the Early Adopter...hrm.

Oh, but what am I saying...I am getting oh so far ahead of myself. I suppose I'm torn. On the one hand, yes, Twitter has become a wonderful tool for marketers and web strategists and social media gurus to communicate with each other-- on the other hand, I don't want to see the beauty of Twitter, the fragmented monologues, to be lost in the agenda-pushing.

Collective Intellect Tracking Brands in the Social Graph

We all know my obsession with "the graph," and lately I have been using Collective Intellect's social media monitoring and analytics app, Media Intellect and seriously, it rocks. Every morning I get emails reporting the topics I am tracking with blog posts and blog authority. The dashboard allows me to track maven identification within a specific topic as well as frequency, share of voice, trends over time, and tonal sentiment. I'll be posting some data I find in the next week as I am tracking.

Collective Intellects clients include: Chrysler, Fleishman, Old Mutual, the American Diabetes Association, the US Chamber of Commerce, as well as extracting tonal sentiment intelligence for Yahoo! Finance (widget on the Finance homepage)

Coke Side of Nothing

Cokes latest foray into social media has led them to create an island in the virtual world There.com. Two things to say about that-- how well did that Coke Pavillion in SecondLife turn out for you guys? and second, virtual worlds are useless (right now) because, well, no one's in virtual worlds (although MTV desperately wants you to think otherwise).

My questions to Coke: What is the objective here other than getting coverage in the NYTimes? Cutting edge branding? I think this will go down as well as New Coke.



Frankly, I don't understand the big companies and why they embark on such money and time-wasting schemes. And this latest one from Coke is mind-boggling given all the data around virtual worlds-- they don't have traction with the market at large; they have significant drop-off rates; their previous SecondLife bust..... Who the hell do they have on their global online marketing team?

Ok, I'm a Sucker for It

Yes, yes, totally puddy in their viral scheming hands...but come on, I did chuckle, especially during the "blog it all" and "you'll blog this" parts...touche!





And, more on Born in the Graph to come...

Born Into The Graph Part I: Preface Continued

So in continuing with the aforementioned history of the social web, lets start a little further back before you made your first dial-up phone call to Prodigy. I've had the privilege of hearing from Ed Yourdon, who is widely known as the lead developer of the Structured Systems Analysis and Design Method (SSADM), as well as co-developer of the Yourdon/Whitehead method of object-oriented analysis/design and the Coad/Yourdon OO methodology of the late 1980s and 1990s. He shared some of his personal experience with early, rudimentary "emailing". Below is a portion of his email to me:


Love In The Time of PDP-6

"When I graduated from MIT in 1965, there were a couple of computer projects (e.g., Marvin Minsky's AI lab, which had a PDP-6 computer) where a small number of people could communicate via e-mail within the same computing environment. I don't know when the first "remote" email communications took place, but you can probably find that somewhere in the "official" lore of Internet history.

I worked at DEC during my undergraduate years, and then afterwards; we, too, had a PDP-6 that allowed us to intercommunicate. And at one point, we hooked our machine up to MIT's AI-lab PDP-6, and got two copies of the "Eliza" AI program (click here for the Wikipedia article) communicating with one another via email. Unfortunately, it degenerated fairly quickly, as each copy of Eliza wanted the other one to do all the talking -- just like a psychiatrist.

A couple years after I worked at DEC, my future-wife and I were working for a NYC-based consulting firm that assigned us to work for a client called ComShare; they had one of the first nationwide time-sharing service bureaus at the time. Toni worked at the Comshare data center somewhere in godawful New Jersey, and I worked in their data center in Ann Arbor, MI; we figured out how to connect the two machines remotely, so that we could communicate inexpensively (i.e., free) via email rather than expensive phone calls.

Several years after that, we started our own NYC-based consulting firm; and through the urgings of a Bell Labs wizard that we had hired (P.J. Plauger, who has written lots of books about UNIX and C, etc.), we became the first non-academic licensee of UNIX in the country ... and, of course, began sprinkling terminals around the office so that everyone could communicate. Then we gave people (including secretaries, salespeople, and anyone else who wanted one) terminals to take home, so they could log in and get their work done at home when miserable weather made commuting impossible.

All of this seems very mundane today, and the technical people on our staff certainly understood what we were doing. But the admin, secretarial, and accounting people had a heck of a time explaining to their friends and family at home why they wanted to connect a big, clumsy teletype or CRT to a big, clunky 300-baud modem in order to dial up the office computer ..."


A Note about Ed and his wife Toni:

"We went to high school together, then went to different colleges. I got her a job programming (with an English degree) after DEC"

I think that is more than awesome...and hey! I have an English degree too...

Born Into The Graph Part I: Preface

So I have been pondering writing a "born into the graph" post for a while...a sort of wandering pondering of what its like to be part of the first generation to grow up with and in the internet starting with child "early adopters" who chatted and emailed on Prodigy and played around CompuServe's global village...

I tweeted this morning about the idea and computer hall of famer Ed Yourdon responded with some amazing info! I am thrilled first to hear from him, and it will also provide some background for this piece which may very well turn into a researched social history of internet usage...we'll see...

So this is part I: the Tidbits from Twitter

(If you're unfamiliar with Twitter's usage, when placing and "@" before someone's username, it is like addressing them directly and shows up as a "reply" to the user)..the following are Ed's responses to me:


yourdon @alisamleo re "born into the graph": does carrying on a relationship via email, circa 1968, count? (Yes, we did have email back then ...)

yourdon @alisamleo MIT had email when I graduated in '65, as did DEC. My wife & I worked @ Comshare in '68, emailing from 2 different datacenters...

yourdon @alisamleo Wife&I provided UNIX email to employees when we started our consulting firm in '74. Employees unable to explain to their friends

Current Geekerati Status: Daily Routine 2.0

Networks:

Facebook
MySpace
imeem
LinkdIn
Virb
Curbly

Utilities:

YouTube
Vimeo
TubeMogul
Flickr

Micro-apps & widgets:

Twitter and Twitterific
Pownce
Techmeme widget
Echo widget
Flickr widget
3 blidgets
DoSomething app
Mahalo Daily


Blogs: 4
Active blogs: 3

Blogs in Google Reader: 10 (not many)

Daily reads:

Mashable
TechCrunch
Scoblizer
ReadWriteWeb
GigaOm
Twitter feeds

Awesome moment of the week: Dave Winer (who invented RSS) started following my Twitter feed!

Geek joke of the week: "I fee so very trapped by the social graph"-- Miss Rogue, aka Tara Hunt

I'll include links later...I'm too lazy and I need to unplug...

Peter Rojas on RCRD LBL

RCRD LBL founder, Pete Rojas discusses his new venture which is potentially the win-win solution to the music industry's internet woes...a sponsor-based model for distributing and monetizing music in digital format.

Met A Canary?

So I'm getting into tumblr for sure... can see what all the fuss is about. My collage of wonderful tweets continues to grow...people think the most interesting and benign things.

Valleywag Likes Net_Art Too

Valleywag loves the HTML art too by the net_art scenesters...holla.
Check it!

Follow Up Thoughts on The Social Media/Advertising Debate

Here are just some follow up thoughts on the response to the CNNMoney.com post, Jim Nails comments, subsquent comments by others on the post, ect...

I agree that the issue is this: can the social graph be monetized and can advertising exist within the context of the social graph. here's my take: advertising must fundamentally change its approach to social media. social media forces brands to communicate AUTHENTICALLY with people (note: not "conusmers") because social media amplifies you are as a brand, as a company. its time to adjust the thinking and dislodge the equilibrium. In order for brands to exist within a social context, they must adapt or fail.

HTML ART

provo (utah) kids up to the coolest stuff
the web as the medium artists
HTML art

Chris Coy is a nasty_net kid

Bardhi Haliti


chris coy just came out to NYC as his work was part of the opening exhibits at the New Museum...holla at ya chris.

they don't give a crap about 2.0 hype...its like post web stuff...vintage web circa 1996

in my moments of social media overload...especially when updating wiki stuff or when Twitterific is chiming off the hook, I just take a HTML zen moment.

i love it...rotating GIF's!

All Under One Roof

There, is that so hard? The little birdie says that Google is actively doing this...but I just have been perplexed as to why all these elements are still fragmented...the space is nimble and new and everyone's experimenting and figuring it out and i love it. Social media strategists and co's know communication....Interactive agencies know design and create the pretty flash stuff...the geekerati build out the killer apps....can't we all get along under one roof? Why can't I bring together the best from these 3 areas ....bring in the expert communicators, the social app experts...the "butterfiles" of the social graph...hook 'em up with the Tobias Baecks of the world + killer app wizzards who dream in code....and then leverage some awesome social media analytics like Collective Intellect...and when the graph opens up then will we really begin to see some thing shaken up in the marketing world.. (come on....I'm on the Giant Global Graph bandwagon and lets aggregate it and tap it)...and now I'm getting off point, which is not unusual given my tangential nature and of course, the ADD...and hence the ellipses..ack.

Note to CNNMoney, Cymfony: Its the Graph!!

This morning's post on CNNMoney interviewing cheif strategy and marketing officer Jim Nail of online media analytics company Cymfony is alarmingly out of touch. Nail's contention is that social networks are facing a bubble because the young and fickle end users network hop as the newest, coolest thing comes along is an outdated notion of the network effects theory. He goes on to ask "Where was MySpace two years ago?" --Uh, getting acquired by News Corp. The issue I see with his argument-- and this coming from an analytics company?-- is that he seems to be confusing "networks" with their platforms; a "network" is really the social graph, the user behavioral data within a platform or container. The issue is not so much the site's themselves, but decentralizing the social graph of each to make accessible to 3rd parties. Decentralization of the social graph is inevitable, the Giant Global Graph will come to fruition in some form--despite the current challenges to achieving aggregation:

As Web Strategist Jeremiah Owyang of Forrester points out, the following are a few of the challenges facing this quest:

-Social Network vendors scared to open up and let customers and their relationships easily move to other networks
-Agreement needed between all vendors and participants
-Ownership over project and data
-Lack of general market awareness
-User adoption (sadly, I think most users are sheep)
-Likely, a need for a single login
-Creation and costs of third-party silo
-Privacy concerns: many European countries may not embrace
-Multiple security issues
-Legal and government may get involved


While there are challenges, it is important to understand that the Graph, is the future of the social web...not the container or platforms. Opening up access to that data and making it portable is what's next up for social networks.

And whats more, is why is an online media analytics company doing touting the burst of the social networks bubble when online ad spend for 2008 is projected to go through the roof...and when graph data is the basis of their business...yikes

Toshiba Head Dome

This....is um-mazing. Yeah, thats not a TV that fell on her head, nor is it a caricature of the digirati...its the Toshiba Dome Head offering users a full 360 degree experience. This is almost as awesome as the Privacy Scarf.

IS it?

Tweet Shots

So I started a Tumblr blog with nothing but screenshots of wonderful Tweets.

A Dialogue: A Chat

dweller:
but seriously
what do you do for fun?
twitter?
blog?
go to the zoo?

aleonard:
ha ha
go to bowery ballroom for shows
oh
and twitter about the show while im there while sending pics of the bands mobiley from my phone to my flickr page which simultaneously gets cast to my blogs and Facebook page via a nice shiney badge--with rounded edges
HA!

dweller:
brilliant

aleonard:
im having a brain meltdown
chocolate cures that
i just took a bite of brownie

Links

Data Portability 2008
Tech Adoption Life Cycle: A Historical Perspective
The Anti Social Media Thread

big brotha

First the crackdown on spolgs, now check out these two headlines...

More from New Media Douche Bags: Makin' it Viral

*Gag* Lets be clear: I hate when new media or ad douche bags say, "lets make a viral." There are too many things wrong with that statement to begin deconstruction, but I'm sure you get the point. Below is my comment left on the recent TechCrunch guest post by Dan Ackerman Greenberg, "The Secret Strategies Behind Many “Viral” Videos." Obviously, anything titled as such was designed in of itself to be a viral post amid this holiday blogosphere lull (I mean, perfect timing when Firefox 3 and the missing "is" from Facebook status's were the dominating stories on Techmeme-- viral potential complete with Mike's 'this digusts me' comment)...and it apparently worked with 375 comments and 150 blog links to the post (correction: 151) so far. Aside from the post being utterly ridiculous and unsurprising (uh, there's no "secret" revealed, and no surprise). It just goes to show how the promise of unlocking the secrets to manipulating new media is like unto the search for the elixer of life. I would expound more on this but right now the post Thanksgiving turkey sandwich is inducing another tryptophan coma and my soon-to-be-nieces are jumping about and wanting to play princesses...

New Media Douchebags, Hooray!

LOL....and guess what? I found this through Scoble's Link Blog tweet, oh the irony heh heh...





Happy Thanksgivig!

I'd Say....Yes

http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/11/20/the-blogosphere-needs-a-vacation/

yeah, im too lazy to title the link...

Twitterific

...Changed my Twitter experience dramatically...I love it!

Also, you know its a slow news day when Firefox 3 Beta and Facebook removing the "is" from status updates are the day's big news....

But Mashable has done well to keep things interesting today

Feels like everyone in the blogosphere is feeling has a major case of holiday fever...

Links

The Echo
Lee's Twitter Guide
Winer's thoughts...decentralize
YoungGoGetters...social media, this should be a case study
YouTube HD or High Quality?
Love this

What I learned from Twitter This Week

I began tweeting in April 2006 at the Web 2.0 Expo and after a short hiatus have been back tweeting daily (I would say "religiously" but I've been attempting to avoid hyperbole lately). While my friends and co-workers can't for the life of them understand the appeal, or importance, of Twitter...frankly, I can't see how they can't. (One caveat here, I do have a mild obsession-- and even woke up one morning realizing that I had just been dreaming in tweets).

Twitter is where the conversations are, and has pretty much replaced my Google reader! Its like the back of the news room where everyone is chattering and thinking aloud and brainstorming before they actually post to their blogs. I used to say I'd read something in the blogosphere two days before it was in print--and a day before the print publication's online counterpart--and now I feel that I can get a sense of what will be in the blogosphere days before the posts go up via Twitter feeds. More than empirical information regarding business or blogging or 2.0...Twitter offers nuanced insight into the lives of others.

This week, not only did I keep keep up with all the bloggers I normally read and find the usual information on Android and Facebook and Apple being anti-social, but I also found out that Allen Stern may be depressed, Max Kalehoff's kid had a birthday party, and Biz Stone was in a conference room at Oxford University. What does this information matter? Maybe it doesn't, but keying into the this kind of information from some of the most dynamic influencers in this ever-evolving communications landscape--surely is worth something in the bucket?



And this just noticed...Allen got a $20million offer for CenterNetworks? Really?

RCRD LBL Live

RCRD LBL is live...widgetized and ready to go

Note to Oprah: Embedding is Immenint

Tsk, tsk, Oprah, disallowing embedding of your YT videos....who cares? We'll get the footage anyway. Paul Potts is my mild obsession at the moment. Look at this darling little man from South Wales...a cell phone salesman turned opera superstar...and he still keeps his day job heh heh!

OMG

OpenSocial, Android and of course, Oprah

Ok, so I'm not even touching OpenSocial or Android...(everyone and their mom twittering has that one covered, besides, not like my two cents is worth, well, two cents)...but you know, for some Pop2.0 I'm twittering away....You know Web 2.0 has completely saturated every nook and cranny of the pop culture radar when Oprah has a "YouTube's Greatest Hits" show....complete with Chad Hurley and Steven Chen on hand to answer questions. Now note: I do not watch Oprah...but maybe I'll tivo it tomorrow since she is having the skating bulldog and Paul Potts on...

A Few Vids..

[via scoble]