The social Super Bowl

Goodbye Super Bowl on TV, hello Super Bowl online: NBC and Verizon Wireless are teaming up to provide live streaming of the game for the first time. But given that the 2010 Olympics and World Cup were both available on the net, the real question is: why the wait?

Another first is the social media command centre headquartered in downtown Indianapolis, the city hosting the event. For 15 hours each day a team of 20 will assist local fans and tourists with everything from finding parking spaces to restaurants – using channels like Facebook and Twitter to do it.

And then there’s mobile discovery company Shazam. Similar to how QR codes act as portals to digital content, the Shazam mobile app ‘listens’ to sound cues in the physical environment and directs users to content online.

The NY Times reports that nearly half of this year’s Super Bowl ads will be “Shazam enabled,” meaning more consumers will be directed to more content during commercial breaks (think coupons, free videos and gift cards).

Polar bear’s first word

Coca-Cola is doing its best to distract audiences from the game on whatever device they’re using to watch it.

On Sunday people can attend the Coke Polar Bowl event on Facebook or follow the bears’ real-time reactions on Twitter. It’s a bold move for the company – the bears have never had a chance to ‘speak’ before.

More buzz is coming from another precedent-setting move: Coke execs will be on-site at NBC studios to select which version their commercial to air. Will it be the bear with the Giants or Patriots insignia who “catches” the Coke bottle?

Ferris Bueller’s Pay Off

Everyone’s a sucker for nostalgia. That’s what brands Proctor & Gamble and Honda are betting on with their spots. If they pull it off, the recession-weary audience will enjoy revisiting some iconic moments in Super Bowl commercial history.

P&G are doing a re-make of Coke’s classic Super Bowl ad “Mean Joe Greene,” replacing the can of Coke with Downy.

Honda and actor Matthew Broderick team up for a long-awaited sequel of sorts to Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.

And Jerry Seinfeld dusts off some of his old Seinfeld catchphrases (and characters) in a spot for Nissan.

The Super Bowl is the biggest advertising event in the U.S., which means there is just too much content for one Sparkbeat post to cover. We haven’t mentioned VW’s “The Dog Strikes Back,” why Pepsi Max chose to go gimmicky, or whether GE’s decision to ditch celebrity glitz will pay off, for instance.

But given that most of these commercials already have millions of views on YouTube, and NBC’s post-game Google+ Hangout is already scheduled to discuss and decide which ad was best, it looks like we needn’t worry. Thanks social media – see you at the game.

As someone who used to work at a sports bar, I understand the chaos that occurs during the Super Bowl. I had the pleasure of working at Buffalo Wild Wings as a waitress in Chicago in 2007 when the Bears made it all the way to that last game. This was the first time in 21 years that our team made it, and boy did I underestimate the amount of excitement that was in store for me when I walked through those doors.

I was being high-fived and hugged by complete strangers as I tried to deliver mozzarella sticks, our usually-quiet phone systems were ringing off the hook, the wings were taken out of my hands before I even set down the plate, and I was hit several times with blowup footballs that my managers so kindly gave away to one of my tables. Needless to say, the sport has a following in North America.

Literally. The sport has a huge following on Twitter. Not only do the majority of the players and announcers have their own personal Twitter accounts, but the National Football League (NFL) has its own account with roughly 2,799,121 followers. In other words, social media has a big impact when it comes to the reputation of the game. Twitter works like a domino effect: The NFL could tweet something, and then one of their followers tweets it to their followers, and so on and so forth.

Fan and player interaction

As with any other big TV event these days, social media gives fans an opportunity to interact with others watching the game. This makes it more fun. When I think about my uncle who lives in a

Defensive Justin Tuck of the New York Giants. Image via nfl.com

house with four football-hating women (even the dog is a girl), I think about how much he enjoys being able to trash-talk on Twitter. It’s a way for fans to connect (and compete) with others who are watching the game in a different place.

The interaction between fan and player has also changed, as players now have the ability to talk directly with fans via their personal accounts. For example, New England Patriots’ superstar quarterback Tom Brady can explain to fans (after the game) that the reason he fell at a pivotal moment is that an opponent grabbed his facemask. So social media is also an opportunity for athletes to maintain their own personal brands.

Watching it for the ads

Finally, we have those advertisements to discuss. Brands have been leveraging the Super Bowl, America’s biggest TV event, for years with blockbuster commercials and special Super Bowl deals. But brands have also begun to increase their social media efforts before, during, and after the game.

A scene from one of the five competing Doritos Super Bowl ads

Budweiser ran a campaign on Facebook that asks fans to guess Super Bowl scores and answer Super Bowl trivia in order to win special deals.

Pizza Hut bought a “promoted tweet” for #ReadySetHut so that Twitter followers would consider buying their product for the big game. Meanwhile, both Doritos and Pepsi let fans vote via Facebook on which commercial would air during the game.

In other words, whether or not you’re a fan, there are plenty of good reasons to watch the Super Bowl.

Check out our roundup of this year’s best Super Bowl ad campaigns.

In 2007 she launched AdBroad, an AdAge Power 150 blog covering her corner of the advertising industry. Then, at SXSW 2009, she coined the term “brand fiction” to describe her unique hybrid of branded entertainment and fan fiction and launched a boutique content agency, Brand Fiction Factory, shortly thereafter.

The idea behind brand fiction is to give brands a life of their own on social media channels, growing the brands’ mythology along with their number of followers.

Her unofficial, Webby award-winning @bettydraper Twitter feed tops out at 31,000 followers, illuminating the inner life of the fictional 1960s housewife in AMC’s Mad Men.

Other Mad Men characters have Twitter profiles as well (some voiced by Ross, some by other fans), creating an ongoing conversation that draws on the show’s plotlines. This develops their personalities while giving new and die-hard fans something to chew on between episodes.

But “Mad Men on Twitter” extends beyond Twitter. Klein Ross and her cohorts even put together a Twepisode titled “Don takes Sally to the Beatles” that imagines how the characters in Mad Men would have experienced the legendary Beatles concert at Shea stadium if Twitter were around in 1965. There’s also a blog, Welcome to the Drapers. (Mad Men’s creator, Matt Weiner, and AMC have given their blessings but declined to officially endorse the project.)

During this year’s StoryWorld Conference in San Francisco, Sparksheet editor Dan Levy caught up with Helen Klein Ross, who explained what brand managers and TV producers stand to gain by bringing some fiction (and fun) to their brands.

It’s the Muppets.

The Jim Henson-created franchise has been in a slump for decades. Their biggest hit was the The Muppet Movie back in 1979. But that was before social media.

The Muppets, released last week in North America, has garnered critical acclaim and fans are pouring into theatres. But perhaps their biggest success has been online: This old-school franchise is the new kung-fu master of branded entertainment.

As Alex Rowland wrote in Sparksheet , branded entertainment works best when users forget they’re watching an ad and when they’re given opportunities to interact with the brand.

Disney chose die-hard Muppet fans Jason Segal and James Bobbin to write and direct the film, and brought in Flight of the Conchords’ Bret McKenzie for the soundtrack, ensuring an authentic Muppet experience while delivering quality content that works on multiple channels.

For two years Disney used – you guessed it – YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and even Google+ to generate buzz online.

They kicked-off the campaign with a decidedly unorthodox but wholly Muppetesque cover of Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody, which went viral, winning two Webbies along the way.

Next, Kermit appeared in *cough* person at the world premier of the latest Pirates of the Carribean installment for the release of The Muppets’ first trailer.

Arguably the campaign’s biggest hit, the series of trailer parodies poked fun at this year’s most anticipated blockbusters. The lighthearted videos capture what so many fans love about the Muppets – their infectious silliness.

As one of the first official brands to join Google+, the Muppets filled the user engagement quota by hosting a Google+ hangout.

As opening weekend approached, the Muppets took a tongue-in-cheek spin on cause marketing with their “Muppets Fan-A-Thon.”

Riffing on the film’s central plot point, Muppet characters urged viewers to “pledge a like” on Facebook. If the page reached the modest goal of a “bazillion” likes, Disney would release advanced screening locations. No, they didn’t reach the bazillion mark, but with 2 million likes, Disney’s not complaining.

Finally, taking aim at haters on Digg and YouTube, the franchise released another viral hit. This time, ill-fated Beaker burns down the set with his rendition of “Dust in the Wind.”

Yes, The Muppets’ aesthetic is 1970s oddball. Yes, their jokes are goofy. But that’s why we love them, and it took a flawlessly executed social media campaign to remind us.

And in case you haven’t had your fill of Muppet-driven branded content, check out our Q&A with Sesame Street’s new media director, Dan Lewis.

However, according to a collaborative study released by The Pew Research Centre’s Project for Excellence in Journalism earlier this week, news organizations have yet to maximize Twitter’s potential. Instead, they’re using it as a promotional tool to draw users to their websites.

Researchers analyzed the main and subsidiary Twitter channels of 13 national and local news organizations (broadcast, radio, print, and online) and 13 of the most followed journalists  over the course of one week in February 2011, revealing their (mostly subpar) Twitter habits.

The self-proclaimed first-of-its kind empirical study of Twitter usage found that “news organizations use Twitter in limited ways – primarily as an added means to disseminate their own material.”

93 percent of the tweets included a link back to the outlets’ own websites and the most popular topics on their Twitter feeds mirrored the headlines on their own platforms.

In terms of prompting user responses, of the 13 outlets studied, only 2 percent of the total tweets solicited information from followers, and just 1 percent were retweets from sources outside of their own organizations. The hashtag function was also deployed minimally, with an average use rate of 20 percent.

So what outlet uses Twitter best? Apparently Fox News, despite tweeting a paltry 48 times. That’s small potatoes compared to top tweeter, the Washington Post, which topped out at 664 tweets in the same timeframe.

But when it comes to mastering the Twitterverse it’s not the number of tweets, but the number of followers that counts – and that’s where Fox News is gaining the most ground.

Between February and October 2011, Fox increased its number of followers by 118 percent, the highest of the 13 outlets analyzed in the report.

Fox also happens to use the retweet function most frequently (44 percent of its tweets), is second in its use of hashtags (50 percent of the time), and is most likely to solicit information from its followers (21 percent of the time).

Pew concludes that the mainstream media are treating Twitter as if Web 2.0 hasn’t happened yet. Before 2.0, publishers controlled everything and user engagement was minimal. This, in part, was because organizations didn’t want to lose their audiences.

Now these same outlets let users give feedback easily, exchange content, and find links to other sites; they realize, according Pew, that they have to give users what they want – even if they didn’t generate it.

And so, “it bears watching whether Twitter use for mainstream news organizations evolves in the same way.”

The bottom line: Major media outlets are not engaging with users as much as they could (and should) be. And as Fox News can attest, the more (human) interaction there is between readers and disseminators, the better the chances of Twitter success.

“What a relief to get up here and not have to explain what I do,” Gomez said, and was rewarded with enthusiastic applause and a deluge of retweets.

Billed as the first-ever conference of people engaged in transmedia ­– or multiplatform – storytelling, StoryWorld was a Dungeons and Dragons-meets-TED Talks gathering of filmmakers, writers, producers and marketers devoted to telling age-old stories in exciting new ways.

The spirit of collaboration and creativity in the Parc 55 Wyndham was palpable – no doubt the conference was a success – but I’m not so sure we’ve moved past definitions just yet.

Sure, everyone at StoryWorld agrees that “the story always comes first,” as the oft-repeated mantra goes. But what is the story, who owns it, and how do we tell it in a collaborative, fair, and profitable way?

Jeff Gomez (Image by James Duncan Davidson via Flickr)

Everything is a story (wait, what?)

The word “story” has gone mainstream, as John David Heinsen from Bunnygraph Entertainment pointed out in a Monday morning session. Let’s say a screenwriter, a producer and a brand marketer sit down at a table. Each may think they’re a storyteller. But they’re not talking about the same thing.

It turns out the words “story” and “storyteller” are fluid and their meanings depends on who’s using them.

Another example of how semantics are important (and confusing) occurred later in the day. Toward the end of a breakout session on “building buzz” someone used the word “brand.” Everyone groaned.

The speaker apologized profusely. But that’s essentially what people mean when they talk about a “story world” ­– a piece of intellectual property that has multiple extensions on different platforms. A brand by any other name.

Of course, the problem is that the word “brand” has become a buzzword. And if we’re not careful, the beautiful word “story” will become one too.

Story worlds are not new

Stories have been around forever (since cavemen and campfires blah blah blah) and so have story worlds. Think J.R.R. Tolkien (proudly invoked by Tricia Pasternak and Lenny Brown from Random House), George Lucas or, of course, Walt Disney.

In a Tuesday morning keynote Disney’s design director Orrin Shively noted that story worlds exist in the real world too; Disney has been creating theme park rides that expand on its branded universes (from Snow White to Finding Nemo) for decades.

What has changed is the variety of platforms available for storytelling, as well as their interactive potential.

Robot Heart Stories

Collaboration is key (but so is consistency)

A fundamental aspect of transmedia storytelling is collaboration – both with other storytellers and with the people formerly known as the audience.

We heard countless examples of transmedia stories “co-created” with fans, from Brent Friedman’s branded TV series Valemont, to Jim Babb’s playful Socks, Incorporated. Transmedia pioneer and Monday keynote Lance Weiler even collaborated with inner-city fifth-grade students on Robot Heart Stories.

Transmedia storytellers also collaborate with each other. While creative types often guard their intellectual property like Gollum guards his ring (sorry, two full days with self-professed geeks), multiplatform storytellers are like jazz musicians: happy to jam on each other’s tracks.

Novelist Sparrow Hall, for example, invites musicians, artists and videographers to riff on his short stories, which he packages into transmedia ebooks. Of course, collaboration requires trust, which means content creators are only willing to share their story worlds with collaborators who are on the same page.

A fundamental rule of story worlds is that they must be consistent across every platform and in each iteration. As Jeff Gomez put it in his presentation, storytellers need to “Show me you care about the story world. Show me it’s real.”

The same lesson applies to all (gasp) brands – whether it’s a magazine, an airline, or a TV franchise.

Collaboration is complex (who owns the story?)

Collaboration fuels transmedia storytelling but it’s also what makes it so incredibly hard to pull off.

In a Tuesday session called “Navigating the Silos,” panelists from Bravo, BBC and LucasFilm commiserated about the roadblocks involved with launching cross-platform initiatives within their own organizations (“I can accept that I.T. is a silo but there’s no excuse for Communications,” bemoaned former BBC content commissioner Rosie Allimonos).

So you can imagine how messy it gets when numerous copyright holders, licensers, and distributors are involved. A Tuesday afternoon session entitled “Co-managing in Collaboration with Stakeholders” attempted to navigate these complexities; it sort of hurt my brain (this probably shouldn’t have been scheduled as the last session of the day).

The key takeaway for prospective transmedia practitioners: “Get a lawyer.”

This question of “Who owns a story?” came up throughout the conference. Some, like “brand fiction” pioneer Helen Klein Ross (who has more than 31,000 followers as the unofficial Twitter voice of Mad Men’s Betty Draper) feel that once it’s released to the world a story belongs to the world.

Others, like Blacklight CEO Zak Kadison, insist a story’s creator is its rightful “gatekeeper.” While this question remains open, it made for one of StoryWorld’s most emotional and important debates.

Stories are good for business

In the end, there’s a practical reason for both Madison Avenue and Hollywood to embrace transmedia: There‘s money to be made.

As Innovative Artists’ David Tochterman put it, transmedia “gives buyers multiple ways to say yes.” Or put slightly differently by Universal McCann’s Jeff Bernstein, “If you’re a storyteller you have a tremendous advantage; you can design an experience that’s scalable.”

But perhaps most crucially – this was stated by multiple speakers – mutliplatform is good for business because it’s what audiences and customers expect. End of story.

Sparksheet is an official media partner for StoryWorld Conference + Expo, which took place October 31-November 2 in San Francisco. 

Sparksheet Editor Dan Levy, Creative Director Charles Lim and Community Manager Joey Tanny

Maybe it’s our creative director’s near-obsessive attention to detail. Maybe it’s the tsunami of tweets our community manager cranks out on a daily basis. Or maybe it all just boils down to Content. Whatever it is, it’s working. And we couldn’t be more proud.

On Monday the third-annual Canadian Online Publishing Awards (COPA) ceremony took place at the Gladstone Hotel in Toronto, with hundreds of digital publishers, editors, and designers in attendance.

This year Sparksheet was nominated for seven awards in the blue division (B2B), and despite the slew of quality competitors, Sparksheet did what few expected, taking the top prize in every category:

• Best Online-Only Site GOLD
• Best Web Design GOLD
• Best Blog GOLD
• Best Use of Social Media GOLD
• Best E-Newsletter GOLD
• Best Mobile-Optimized Site GOLD
• Best Article or Series (for Brand New Havana) GOLD

As the winners were announced, the Twittersphere lit up: some at the ceremony had never heard of us, others were simply baffled by our success. Here are some of our favourites from the evening:

@CraigSilverman: Hey look at the Sparksheet editor eating his too many awards! #COPAwards pic.twitter.com/9MP7GWFF

@Mastheadmag: We lost track of how many awards Sparksheet won. #COPAwards

@PoppedCulture: One last award for @nationalpost - a silver for best companion website. #COPAwards @sparksheet won everything else.

@mattlundy33: At the #copawards. Wtf is sparksheet?

@thismason: In the end, we snatched victory from the jaws of Sparksheet #copawards

@VickiJane13: Sparksheet is cleaning up in here! Anyone have any idea what that is? #copawards

@mattlundy33: Sparksheet is like when the Lord of the Rings ran the table at the Oscars. #copawards

@ALeeGreenberg: Who IS Sparksheet, you ask? Big time #copawards winner, for starters.

@ssawchuk: Sparksheet. Win all the things. #COPAwards

@spafax_arjun: With all their mega COPA awards, pretty sure the @Sparksheet guys are going to be insufferable #spafax

Congratulations to all the other nominees and winners (other multiple-award winners included the CBC, Globe and Mail, National Post, OpenFile and Torontoist). And a huge thanks to the COPA judges and crowd for your support!

How do you maintain Playboy’s unique voice, outlook and culture across so many disparate media, from print and video, to Facebook and Twitter?

It’s a challenge to ensure that all of our mouthpieces are aligned in terms of voice, tone and messaging. Back in the day, the magazine was it.

Now we have constant external communications on TV, radio, Playboy.com, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, Ustream, TheSmokingJacket.com and other communications vehicles.

Each of these platforms must stick to the brand’s identity and [they] are constantly monitored to make sure they’re on-brand and in line with Hef’s vision and our editorial director’s ideas.

That said, each platform communicates and publishes differently and may also have separate audiences, so the way they represent/interpret the brand may differ slightly.

What’s the goal of Playboy’s social media activity, and how do you measure success?

We have a number of goals in social media. First, building celebrity for our Playmates and models. Years ago TV was the only way for a Playmate to make the major step from centrefold to household name. Pamela Anderson and Jenny McCarthy are prime examples, but since we know that every Playmate with some charisma and a story to tell isn’t going to end up on TV, social media is the way to grow their audience.

Each new Playmate goes through our social media training and is introduced to our fan base (5 million+ on Facebook, 250,000 on Twitter) when her issue comes out. Within days she’ll have a thriving fan base of her own and we’ll work with her to create content and identify digital influencers to interact with. There are over 90 Playmates actively using Facebook and Twitter with a combined following of over 2 million, giving Playboy the sexiest army of digital brand advocates in the world.

Second, increasing engagement with our fan base beyond the pages of the magazine. We create specific content franchises for each platform in order to properly use each channel and not just post content for the sake of having a presence on a certain site.

Third, generating revenue. A few years ago, managing social media for a brand was mainly focused on growth, engagement, listening or some other buzz term. Monetizing was a nice-to-have but certainly not a primary objective.

Now once we reach a certain scale, revenue is a must in order to justify the existence of jobs like mine, right? True success in this space is quantifiable.

How would you describe the quintessential Playboy reader, and have your perceptions of him or her changed as you’ve engaged with readers online?

In terms of our social media audience, it spans beyond just the obvious, which is the guy who appreciates beautiful women.

Some of the other types we see include people that love the brand and its history, women that became fans after watching The Girls Next Door on E!, women who are aspiring Playmates, and people in search of men’s entertainment and lifestyle content.

We all know that Top 10 lists and sexy photo galleries are good for traffic, but Playboy has made its reputation on long-form articles and in-depth interviews. How do you attract eyeballs without sacrificing the quality of your content?

It’s important for us to recognize that there are many different types of people that come to Playboy.com via many different entry points. For example, if someone gets to the site to check out the latest Playmate, how can we make them aware that there’s a great interview or gaming feature they’d be interested in?

Or if they got to Playboy.com from a site that linked to an interview, how can we keep them on site to enjoy the eye candy? The “link-bait” may bring in more visitors, but the “long form” is what will build a true audience for a site.

With the Playboy mansion, you guys were pioneers in extending the “magazine experience” into the real world. Do you think being involved with things like events and nightclubs is an increasingly important part of what it means to be a magazine in the 21^st century?

Absolutely. Playboy allows consumers to interact with the brand and experience the Playboy lifestyle through parties and experiences at the Playboy Clubs. In 2006, we opened a multi-faceted entertainment venue in Las Vegas. More recently, we’ve opened Playboy Clubs in London, Cancun and Macau and look forward to continuing the expansion.

The Playboy brand has always been representative of “the good life” and we have always offered exclusive opportunities to enjoy that good life via nightclubs, parties and special events.

Playboy.com features a mix of free content and premium stuff. Do you think you’ve struck the right balance between the “open web” and “walled garden” approaches to online content?

Playboy has a number of web properties that aim to reach different audiences. Playboy.com includes a mix of girl features, entertainment stories and longer articles.

The Smoking Jacket, Playboy’s safe-for-work site, includes shorter posts, lists, “quick hits” that you’d want to pass along to your friends, and non-nude girl features. Playboy’s subscription sites offer extended girl content.

Our sites aim to attract different readers and viewers; we work to give fans a variety of content, both free and paid.

When people think of Playboy, they obviously think of your founder, Hugh Hefner. How have you brought Hef’s considerable legacy and personality into the online space?

Hef is extremely active on Twitter and it has become a part of his daily routine. People always ask if it’s really him, and it is Hef on his iPad from the Playboy Mansion. A lot of his tweets are answering fan questions, good or bad, so Twitter truly is an engagement platform for him.

Photos courtesy of Playboy

Below are some of our recent favourites from around the social networks:

This Week on Twitter

@brandchannelhub: Twitter Proves Mettle With Oslo Tragedy, Winehouse Demise http://bit.ly/nYkLw8

@mashable: Why Location-Based Gaming Is The Next Killer App [OPINION] – http://on.mash.to/oSpMN3

@fastcompany: Who should brands target on @Facebook? Hint: It’s not their fans. http://bit.ly/r754ii

@mtlgazette: Women aren’t pushed to enter tech world http://dlvr.it/cJt3j (Stay tuned for Ja-Naé Duane’s take on this issue on Sparksheet)

@spafax_arjun: David Meerman Scott: Are Google, Facebook, and Twitter Taking Social Backwards http://huff.to/lIJVN4

@NeimanLab: Condé Nast’s Scott Dadich on reinventing mags for the iPad http://nie.mn/kpUQ4u (He must’ve read Charles Lim’s Sparksheet column on The Problem with Magazine Apps)

@smashingmag: New Note on DesignInformer: 50 Things Every Creative Should Know -http://www.the-50.org/

@spafax: Great interviews on @thepulse Pulse Network New Marketing TV by @sparksheet Editor Dan Levy (@danjl). http://ow.ly/5A6in #spafax (Props, Dan!)

@fastcompany: RT @DavidHazeltine: Why Smart #Brands Are Embracing @Tumblr http://bit.ly/kfLNax

Going viral

SONIC’s “Heart’s Desire” Commercial

Is Sonic’s food really that good? The fast food chain’s latest TV spot will leave you in stitches… and craving cheesy tots.

The Google+ Trailer

Google+ gets The Social Network treatment.

Pictures of the week

The next frontier of marketing: Planet earth.

A sampling from AdWeek’s “20 Clever Bus-Shelter Ads to Brighten Your Travels.”

“Im watching u,” reads a text message sent to passersby of this Australian bus shelter. But don’t worry, it’s not a stalker. It’s an ad promoting the latest season of Big Brother using Bluetooth transmission. "Big Brother is back. 7 PM weeknights on TEN" reads the next message 30 seconds later. Phew!

Vitaminwater won't just recharge you, it will also recharge your mobile device. Nifty!

Ann Curry @140conf - Image by bjmccray via Flickr

Ann Curry takes her role as anchor to heart. Curry believes that television news anchors are responsible for holding down the journalistic principles of truth and accuracy in a world where the real-time news cycle often leads to error and misinformation.

Opening with a tongue-in-cheek impression of her Japanese mother, Curry charmed the crowd into a tweeting frenzy at last month’s 140conf.

During her 10-minute talk, entitled “Journalism in the State of Now,” Curry boldly declared that today’s journalists find themselves “where no generation has gone before.”

In particular, Curry addressed social media’s role in igniting social activism and spreading knowledge. She said that Facebook and Twitter offer people a platform to express their hopes and frustrations, or what she calls their “beautiful outrage.”

We caught up with Ann Curry backstage to chat about the changing state of news journalism and how she approaches her role as anchor across multiple platforms.

Ann Curry @140Conf - Image via Flickr: bjmccray

You’d think these things would be obsolete by now. But, as I theorized on the 140conf stage in front of 800-plus people (not to mention the thousands who tuned into the webcast), face-to-face events like 140conf have only become more meaningful in a connected age.

As humans, we like to get together to share stories and ideas and conversations with people from around the world. The problem is that as soon as the curtain goes down, all of these stories and ideas and conversations fade into the ether – save for a photo or two. That’s why we partnered with 140conf curator Jeff Pulver to keep the conversation going before, during and after the event.

Before the conference, for example, we caught up with Funny or Die marketing director and conference speaker Patrick Starzan to chat about the online video website’s viral success. We also ran a short think piece by 140conf opera singer Ja-Naé Duane.

Then, while the conference was going on, our “ground team” at Sparksheet HQ was glued to the “backchannel” in order to curate a stream of the most interesting audience tweets in real time. Meanwhile, I shot some exclusive backstage videos with the likes of AOL CEO Tim Armstrong, Foursquare founder Dennis Crowley and Today Show anchor Ann Curry. Stay tuned for those in the coming weeks.

For now, here are some key takeaways from two eclectic, content-filled days:

Cory Booker @140conf - Image via Flickr: bjmccray

The web is a big tent

Have I used the word “eclectic” yet? Because there really is no better word to describe Jeff Pulver’s events. In keeping with the micro nature of Twitter, 140conf consisted of about 90 10-minute talks spread out over two dizzying days.

The lineup included everyone from tech-savvy farmer Steve Tucker and spiritual guru Deepak Chopra, to radiation oncologist Krupali Tejura and Newark mayor Cory Booker.

It was an important reminder that when we use terms like “users” and “audience” and “readers” and “consumers,” what we’re really talking about is people. All different kinds of people. Everywhere.

Jeff Jarvis @140conf - Image via Flickr: bjmccray

Slow down

It’s funny. According to the 140conf tagline, this event was all about “exploring the state of now” and taking stock of what’s happening on “the real-time web.” But one of the main lessons of the conference was that we all need to slow down. Fast.

The problem with the web’s hurried pace is that it doesn’t leave much space for verification. That’s why media scholar Dan Gillmor is trying to launch a “slow news” movement, where citizens join journalists as “active consumers” of the news who approach so-called facts with a healthy dose of skepticism.

Case in point, NPR news curator Andy Carvin recounted how he helped unmask an American activist who spent months posing as a Syrian blogger called “Gay Girl in Damascus.”

The hoax fooled mainstream media outlets for months, but media critic Jeff Jarvis suggested, in a separate talk, that the onus of verification rests on readers as well as journalists. “I’m not asking you to question the article,” Jarvis said, “I’m asking you to question your assumptions.”

Cathy Brooks @140conf - Image via Flickr: bjmccray

Listen up

While media pundits like Carvin, Gillmor and Jarvis talked about slowing down, several other 140conf speakers encouraged us to put away our smartphones, tablets and laptops  ­­– and listen up. Storytelling consultant Cathy Brooks, for example, began her talk with a tongue-in-cheek spoken-word piece that implored the audience to “shut up and breathe.”

In an informative talk on how to interview famous people, film journalist Warren Etheredge explained that “the first step in having a conversation is preparing yourself to listen.” Etheredge said the only interview question he prepares is the first one – the rest flow from listening to the person’s answers.

Social marketing expert Ted Rubin even coined a new buzzword for the value of listening to our customers and peers: Return on Relationship.

Ian Spector @140conf - Image via Flickr: bjmccray

You can’t plan everything

Another term bandied around quite a bit at 140conf was “serendipity.” Indeed, many of the presenters had stumbled upon online success (or at least celebrity) accidentally.

Ian Spector, for example, launched a website in 2005 filled with funny “facts” about actor Chuck Norris. To date, the site has received more than 250 million views, and spawned a bestselling book series.

In a different vein, Foursquare founder Dennis Crowley spoke of the many unexpected ways merchants and brands use the location-based platform. But the theme of serendipity was summed up best by former news anchor Anita Cochran in the title of her ten-minute talk: “What, I’m a brand?”

The Lupus Ladies of Twitter @140Conf - Image via Flickr: bjmccray

All good things

Finally, I would be remiss not to mention the many speakers who took the 140conf stage to talk about how they are using the web to help people.

From the “Lupus Ladies of Twitter,” who used social media to raise awareness and build support for a groundbreaking new Lupus drug, to Hollaback’s Emily May and her crusade against street harassment, these inspiring people reminded us that the web is about more than ROI or ROE or ROR or any other catchy acronym.

It’s about people from all over the world getting together to do good things. Sort of like 140conf.

Last week at Apple’s World Wide Developer Conference, Steve Jobs introduced the long-awaited iCloud, the free service that will allow users to seamlessly (and cordlessly) sync their Apple devices. While the move is being championed as Apple “finally getting the web,” some critics are questioning whether the service is ready to serve the business world.

Speaking of Apple, along with the iCloud, Jobs also gave a sneak peek of iOS 5, which will “deeply integrate” Twitter into the operating system, but not so much Facebook.

In another nod to Twitter, Facebook is now testing its “Happening Now” feature on a handful of users.

As of June 20, brands will be able to apply for top-level domain extensions, meaning they will be able to purchase URLs ending in their brand names. The new domain offerings will give brands that do not own their desired URLs a second chance at reclaiming themselves on the web.

Views from around the web

Zip up that hoodie, Zuckerberg; Mashable’s Adam Ostrow thinks Twitter is the new Facebook.

Has “informational dystopia” finally arrived? Slate’s Jacob Weisberg pops author Eli Pariser’s “Filter Bubble,”

Lessons from Weinergate: “This should be a lesson to those who get too relaxed about powerful forces they mistakenly believe are within their control.”

Random bytes

Media agencies are putting their money where their mouse is by allocating more funds to online marketing.

Does this screen make my butt look big? The next generation fitting room.

Google’s Do-Ra-Mi doodle finds a permanent domain.

Going viral

Facebook and Twitter are taken to the streets, showing us just how awkward our online practices actually are:

The man responsible for Old Spice’s Emmy-winning “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like” spot strikes again, this time with beer:

Duck and cover! Angry birds comes to life in Barcelona:

What’s app-ening

The app answer to Damn You Auto Correct, plus Business Insider’s list of other apps you may have missed.

PC World’s best budget apps (only 99 cents!) for when boredom ensues.

Order sushi like a pro with these apps. Domo Arigato, Apple (and Android).

Twitter launched in the summer of 2006 at a time when broadband access was spreading around the world. By March 2007, SXSW delegates were discovering the platform as an ideal way to connect with each other and share news and events tips during the festival. It’s hard to remember a time when “tweeting” wasn’t a household world, but this was the moment when Twitter went mainstream.

Four years later, Twitter still matters. The microblogging service has created a back channel between individuals and the brands, institutions and media outlets that serve them. In 2011, a company big enough to have a Chief Marketing Officer (CMO), should now be hiring a Chief Listening Officer (CLO) to not only monitor the various conversations that are taking place about their brand in real time – but to participate in them.

Twitter has also made brands more human. When a company hires someone to represent them on Twitter they can no longer hide behind their corporate logo or press release. Brands online are expected to connect with consumers in honest, unscripted ways that are breaking down the boundaries between content consumer and content creator in dozens of industries.

Facebook, by contrast, remains a closed community. Each of Facebook’s 600 million plus users decides who is part of their social network. Any information that flows in and out of this network is limited by its size and by various privacy settings.

Twitter is unbounded. When you post a statement on Twitter, anyone can find and share it with their community. This ability for random strangers to amplify and distribute a message has changed the balance of power on the Web.

We’re living in an age where a teenaged protester in a farflung country can have the same reach and clout online as a celebrity or established media outlet. Look at what’s happening in Egypt and Tunisia and Libya, where Twitter is giving disenfranchised people a voice, and a way for journalists and activists to find them. News is reported on Facebook; news breaks on Twitter.

While misinformation and clutter will always exist in such an open medium, Twitter has brought honesty and accountability back to the Web. Unlike the chat rooms and message boards that came before it, Twitter is all about connecting with like-minded strangers using your real name, not a screen name or alter ego. This in turn has helped make the Internet an extension of the physical world, a place where real business and social relationships can bloom.

Many of the friends I am looking forward to connecting with during SXSW 2011 are people I first met in this virtual marketplace. I can’t wait to find out what sort of revolutions this year’s event has in store. And I can’t wait to share them with the rest of my friends on Twitter.

With more than 1400 companies in attendance, the conference highlighted everything from smart phones to tablets to new applications for these proliferating devices. Even good old Angry Birds found a place in this week’s festivities, taking home the awards for Best Mobile App and App of the Year on the Apple platform.

It’s no surprise that tablets dominated this year’s conference. Acer launched its new Iconia tablets, which critics hope will have a more reasonable price tag than some of its competitors. HTC also revealed its Flyer model, which CEO Peter Chou claims is more than just another “me-too” product.

More than a showcase for new devices, the event made headlines by uncovering some controversial opinions about the world’s most powerful tech companies. For example, AT&T’s CEO found himself with few positive things to say about Apple’s customer service. On a more positive note, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer discussed the benefits of the Windows Phone 7 and boasted about the positive reactions it has received.

Smart phone pioneers Research in Motion also presented some new developments with Blackberry, unveiling a new app that manages travel itineraries. And Mark Zuckerberg a made a cameo via video recording to put the rumours about a Facebook phone to rest.

Throughout the conference, members were kept well informed via MWC’s  Twitter feeds. We can only hope that this year’s countless innovations will give us plenty to talk about on the mobile front until Mobile World Congress 2012.

Top stories

New LG Smartphone uses 3D technology.

Yahoo reveals Livestand, the latest in personalized magazines for tablets.

The Brazilian High Court apologizes for a Twitter message.

Apple implements controversial subscription fees. And so does Google.

Views from around the web

Yet another take on social media’s role in the Egyptian Revolution.

Facebook turns a new page, changing the role of page administrators.

Smart displays move in-store at JC Penny.

TED continues to “spread ideas worth spreading” on their new Quora-inspired forum.

This week in social media

Lil Wayne vs. Oreo: The unusual Facebook battle over a Guinness World Record:

Blackberry coordinates with TAT for a new scrapbook app:

The rise of Twitter has created a marketing opportunity and identity crisis for media brands looking to do what they always say they want to do: “engage.” What Twitter does better than any other platform is allow brands to put on a more human face.

Whether you’re a New York Times reporter or an airport, Twitter makes engagement easy. But it also makes it easy for others to hijack your brand.

The rise of social media has brought back a classic dilemma: How much of their own content should brands control? Allowing fans to create their own works from copyrighted material has always been a perceived problem – just look at the tussles in fandom’s most celebrated community, the Trekkies.

Two decades ago fan fiction was a popular but hidden practice, distributed in underground networks, through gatherings, and in the mail. The old kind of mail. Yet the digital revolution has brought fandom out into the open and so far the evidence is clear: Fan-generated content is good for business.

Mad Men Wars

What’s the problem with fake Don Draper, now with nearly 13,000 followers? Two years ago cable channel AMC thought something was, and shut down a host of Mad Men Twitter characters, claiming copyright infringement and false marketing.

The Mad Men-Twitter wars, now peacefully ended, are instructive. Creator Matthew Weiner is notoriously protective of his show and its messaging, hating on spoilers to the extent that even the teaser clips at the end of each episode are so cryptic that they’re effectively pointless. He’s so obsessed with preserving the series’ historical accuracy that creating official Twitter accounts for characters from the 1960s probably seemed sacrilegious.

But AMC underestimated the zeal of its fan base. Character-driven – as opposed to plot-driven – shows inspire identification and, therefore, fiction. While online social networking clearly does not fit within the universe of the show, the themes of Mad Men – secrets, obfuscation, ambiguity – compel fans to fill in the blanks. AMC should have realized that it did not need a centralized Twitter campaign: The fans would do it themselves.

The Social Networks

Meanwhile, many younger and less high-brow TV series have experienced the opposite dilemma: So well-suited to Twitter are shows like Fox’s Glee and NBC’s Community that networks have felt compelled to participate. Glee’s official character accounts are among the most popular on Twitter, garnering tens of thousands of followers (Jane Lynch’s Sue Sylvester tops them at 120,000).

Yet despite its openness to Twitter, the network isn’t too active on the site. The official Glee characters have just a couple hundred tweets apiece; likewise for some of Community’s ensemble.

To cater to its base, the modestly-rated Community staged a “Twittersode” to promote its second-season premiere (it wasn’t the first twittersode: MTV did something similar last year with its transmedia web series Valemont). But the effort came off as a somewhat desperate attempt to generate some Glee-like buzz.

Community and Glee’s Twitter accounts are both pretty funny, but neither show seems to be able to meet the demand from their audiences.

To Tweet or Not to Tweet

What’s the takeaway from AMC’s and the networks’ diverging Twitter experiences? Serve your fans, or get out of the way. If your business or brand is developing a following, give consumers more content; if fans beat you to it, let them thrive. In the end, fan activity cannot be forced or faked.

CBS realized that the crowd has the answer when it optioned a Twitter account, now the decently-rated $#*! My Dad Says – a practice it is repeating. Old Spice followed demand when it had actor Isaiah Mustafa record dozens of personalized YouTube videos to Twitter fans.

If consumers want to hear more from your brand, they’ll say so. And if they don’t hear back, well, they’ll just do it themselves.

Social Media played a big role in the debate, as consumers shared their war stories on Twitter and YouTube. Key players jumped on the opt-out day train, with Loopt and Foursquare offering iPods and badges to those who requested a pat down in lieu of a an AIT scan.

Amidst growing hysteria, critics like Politico’s Micheal Kinsley called for some perspective. Meanwhile, the TSA continues to defend its position in light of recent terror attacks, but promises to address the growing oeuvre of stories of less-than-pleasant pat-down experiences.

Airlines + Travel Marketing

Despite a poll suggesting 61% of Americans are opposed to the new AIT scanner technology and pat-down procedure,  U.S. airports reported few holiday travel hold-ups.

Jamaica makes 100,000 fast Facebook friends, thanks to social media marketing.

In a surprising turn of events, PhoCusWright’s Online Travel Review reported offline travel bookings surpassing online bookings in 2010.

Media + Magazines

Amazon’s new plan to dismantle Brick-and-Mortar competitors? Hit them in the aisles.

iPad or Android? The platform debate for the publishing community.

The Last Newspaper, now on display at The New Museum.

Branded Content + Entertainment

NetFlix takes aim at their competition with a new streaming-only solution.

Tim Burton crowd-sources some creepy tales in the weeks leading up to his upcoming Toronto showing.

Online ad network RadiumOne introduces Like-vertising – a new approach to targeted-advertising.

Branded Content + Entertainment

Museums, retailers and airlines bring guerilla marketing into the social savvy aughts: Guerrilla Marketing in 2010.

Edelman’s Carole Cone warns marketers that “Cause-related marketing, as we know it, is dead.”

Jumping on the latest zombie trend, BrandFlakes suggests you can speak “directly to your audience’s desires. Even if their desires include BRAINS…”

Media + Magazines

Print Matters! The NY Art Book Fair’s patrons redefine print, “unrestrained by the dictates of readability.”

What do last week’s US election results mean for marketers and media types? Advertising Age considers.

Is online media pioneer Slate falling behind its younger, less erudite competitors? The NY Observer discusses.

Airlines + Travel Marketing

The Cranky Flier discusses how Southwest Airlines measures the success of “Bags Fly Free”

Looking to update your customer experience? Here are a few lessons for travel brands.

Ease your airport anxiety: iPhoneness releases a list of the Top 10 Airport Apps for iPhone.

Over the course of the last year, incidents such as Southwest Airlines’ Kevin Smith fiasco, and the ominous Icelandic ash cloud have elevated branded tweeting from a viable marketing helping hand to an indispensable B2C tool.

Searching Mashable for “airlines on Twitter” brings up a list of content long enough to warrant its own tag, with similar content appearing everywhere from marketing blogs to travel and tourism websites.

“Airlines on Twitter” was even poached as a domain name, hosting a tool for tracking airlines’ Twitter usage in real time. Like dog years to human, time on the Web seems to pass by sevenfold, and the business world is now well aware of the impact Twitter has had, and continues to have on their brands.

Content first

Smart airlines have learned that Twitter is more than a customer service platform or PR message board. With some brands offering funny and off-the-cuff content on a rapid cycle, following airlines can often be more entertaining and rewarding a pastime for Twitter users than following some celebrities. Air New Zealand (@FlyAirNz) out-tweets some of its much larger competitors, updating followers on the exploits of its puppet mascot, Rico. FlyAirNZ’s tweeted content regularly traverses the Web, often finding itself on Facebook, blogs and other websites outside of the company’s reach.

For an extreme example of content standing alone, check out the Aloha_Airlines Twitter feed. Even though the defunct airline folded its wings in March of 2008, its Twitter account managed to retain a fair-sized following for well over a year, solely on the power of its customer engagement.

Giving nods to other airlines and updating followers on the status of employees, Aloha lived on in spirit, and even managed to make it into more than one “best airline on Twitter” list despite being permanently grounded.

Branded contests

A popular form of branded content, contests and cross-promotions are springing up in hash tags all over Twitter. Drawing on the popularity of the Awkward Family Photo blog, Virgin Airlines offered a family vacation package in exchange for embarrassing family portraits.

EasyJet created the 15-Hour Blogger Challenge, showcasing four prominent travel bloggers in four destinations with frequent updates. Followers vote on their favourite journey for a chance to win a short trip to the winning city.

Cheeps & Twares

Some airlines do contests, others prefer deals. JetBlue pioneered the latter with their famous “Cheeps” concept. In the last six months, other companies have been quick to mimic these lightning-fast last-minute airfare specials on Twitter, with their own cutely named fare deals; United Airlines does “Twares,” for instance. Notably effective from day one, these offers continue to drive up hits to the companies’ main sites and effectively push sales in off-seasons.

Turbulence

Engaging in the real-time Web hasn’t been smooth sailing for all airlines. With the speed and scale of Twitter’s reach, it’s easy for brands to lose control of their message. As we reported earlier this year, Kevin Smith’s “not-so-silent” dust-up with Southwest Airlines was exacerbated by Southwest’s allegedly “snotty” online persona which, though familiar to the airline’s fans, was jarring to many outsiders, including the well-known director.

Like all recognizable brands on Twitter, airlines have had oodles of imitators, though the large majority of phonies have been weeded out at this point in the game. Still, Twitter users have caused their fair share of controversy in the world of airlines outside of airlines’ official accounts, including this hoax during the Haiti crisis, and this one following the Icelandic volcano eruptions.

Engage

Though many critics have praised Twitter’s real-time customer service capabilities, others suggest that a bandwagon mentality is the real driving force behind brands warming to social media trends, pointing out that embracing the technology is not the same as engaging with technology.

Some airlines still seem to prefer to use Twitter as a one-way PR tool, neglecting a large and integral part of the network’s value as a medium. In an interesting (if not exactly scientific) experiment, travel blog A Tramp Abroad attempted to panel airline Twitter usage by directing this query @15 major airlines:

We’re doing a survey – do you generally respond to customer inquiries received on Twitter? Average response time?

This experiment was completed in July 2010, with roughly 60 percent of airlines queried responding within 24 hours. Again, time flies in the digital world, and chances are that percentage has grown considerably, even just three months later. All things considered, it’s clear that Twitter’s status as a liaison between companies and customers has taken off, and will likely continue to soar.

Further reading: Airlines on Twitter

SimpliFlying’s list of interesting airline and aviation experts on Twitter

Cheap-o-Air’s top airlines on Twitter

About.com’s list of Top Ten Airlines on Twitter

Measure your favourite airline’s tweet-score with Tweetlevel.com

Track airlines’ activity on airlinesonTwitter.com.

Photo by mary hodder via flickr

Let’s start with the basic question: What is VRM and why should businesses and marketers care about it?

VRM is Vendor Relationship Management. It’s the customer-side counterpart of Customer Relationship Management, meaning it’s the way customers manage their relationship with vendors. Businesses should care about it because customers will come to market with their own tools, and it’s a good thing to be ready to engage with those tools and those customers.

What role do Facebook, Twitter and other so-called social media play in VRM?

They provide ways to test or prototype some VRM activities. For example, one can put out what we call a “personal RFP” on Twitter. A couple years ago I did that at O’Hare when my family was delayed several hours by a snowstorm. I tweeted a request for pointers to a good sit-down restaurant at the airport and got a pile of helpful responses.

But we were still inside Twitter’s silo. Twitter owns and controls the means by which I issued that RFP. This is very much like it was when e-mail was owned and controlled by companies. You had to operate inside AOL’s mail, or Microsoft’s mail, or MCI’s mail. Today only one company controls all of tweeting, and that’s a problem, no matter how well Twitter behaves.

We have the same problem with Facebook. One company owns the whole show. It’s AOL 2.0. No matter how big Facebook gets, it can’t be bigger than the Web, and certainly not bigger than the Net. It’s a giant walled garden. And walled gardens are not free marketplaces. They are private ones.

Both Twitter and Facebook are close to becoming clichés as well. See Dilbert from last month, especially that first frame:

That you say “so-called social media” says a lot as well. As I’ve pointed out, social media are largely understood as marketing vehicles. Telephony, texting and blogging are no less “social” than Twitter and Facebook, but are dismissed or ignored because they have less marketing value.

VRM is social to the degree that humans are social, shopping is social, and dealing with companies in the marketplace is social. And, to the degree that “social media” – whatever they are – help, we might call them VRM tools. But VRM will never be a branch of social media or marketing, any more than any of us are branches of commercial entities.

What opportunities does the widespread adoption of mobile smartphones present for VRM?

This is the limitless sweet spot for VRM.

Humans are mobile animals. We were not built only to sit at desks and type on machines, or even to drive cars. We were built to walk and talk before we did anything else.

This is why mobile devices at their best serve as extensions of ourselves. They enlarge our abilities to deal with the world around us, with each other, and with the organizations we relate to. This especially applies to companies we do business with.

Right now we are at what I call the “too many apps” stage of doing this. Every store, every radio station, every newspaper and magazine wants to build its own app. At this early stage in the history of mobile development we need lots and lots of experimenting and prototyping, so having so many apps (where in lots of cases one would do) is fine.

But as time goes on we’re going to want fewer apps and better ways of dealing with multiple entities. For example, we’ll want one easy way to issue a personal RFP, or to store and selectively share personal data on an as-needed basis.

We won’t want our health data in five different clouds, each with its own app. We may have it in one cloud, for example, much as most of us currently have our money in one bank. But we’ll also need for that data to be portable, and the services substitutable.

Are there any businesses or services putting VRM tools into action? Anyone making money with them?

A number of companies are making VRM tools. Azigo, Kynetx and MyDex are three that come to mind. A number of open-source projects are also in the works. I’m working with students at MIT and Kings College London on my own development projects (r-button, EmanciPay and related tools). The list goes on.

It’s important to remember that not everything useful in the marketplace comes from companies or makes money. The protocols in the Internet’s suite make no money in themselves, yet support trillions of dollars in economic activity and benefits.

Look up RSS on Google and you’ll get more than two billion results. Dave Winer created RSS (Really Simple Syndication) as a tool to make it easy for anybody to syndicate what they publish. He didn’t do that to make money for RSS itself, but to enlarge the publishing world as a place where many – including himself – could make money and do other good stuff.

The authors of the e-mail protocols we all take for granted (SMTP, POP3, IMAP) just wanted a simple zero-cost way to do e-mail, not to make money with it. And e-mail supports a heap of economic activity as well.

In fact both RSS and e-mail qualify as VRM tools already in use.

If you want to see which way the wind is starting to blow here, look at this tweet from Alexander Ainslie:

Blaine is one of the founders and architects of Twitter. Webfinger is a way to translate e-mail addresses to URLs. This too can be a powerful VRM tool.

You recently hosted a VRM+CRM summit, where you brought folks from both sides together to cross-pollinate. Did you find any common ground?

Well, it was a workshop, rather than a summit, and it was terrific. We had a lot of very productive dialog, and agreement about the need to engage. We also saw clearly that both sides have a long way to go.

What mattered was that both sides were moving toward meeting in an open marketplace where customers roam free and companies see more value in free customers than in captive ones.

Check out Part II of our interview in which we ask Doc about privacy, marketing buzzwords and his contention that “brands are boring.”

Stories are necessary (but not sufficient)

During one panel, Zach Behrens, editor of LAist.com, said the following: Stories have a point, conversations don’t always, and that’s why social media needs stories to be successful.

It’s a nice quote that can be easily repeated – not to mention tweeted. If social media only consisted of conversations, it would turn into a customer service platform or just plain noise. Brands need a coherent narrative to connect with their customers.

At the same time, social media can’t only be about stories because in that case the brand is talking at – not with – their audience. Social media must be a combination of the two with the end goals always in mind.

You must improvise

This was a key theme of Mike Bonifer, cofounder of GameChanges, LLC, an improvisation-based learning platform that helps businesses communicate better. Social media does not work as push advertising.

Brands must continue to change and tweak their strategies based on where users take the conversation. Rigidity, such as refusing to discuss unplanned topics or only engaging on specific channels, cannot exist in social media.

To successfully connect and share with customers, brands must be open to new conversations and willing to move in new directions. Bonifer introduced this idea by having the audience control a portion of his presentation. He had approximately 15 slides that covered his upbringing, schooling and professional experience.

Bonifer would begin discussing a slide; when the audience wanted him to move on they would shout “AND…” he had to immediately switch slides and topics, adapting his presentation on the fly. Improvisation in action.

The medium doesn’t matter

You could rattle off a list of social networks for days on end and still never cover them all. How is a business supposed to learn strategies for connecting with customers on each network? The short answer: They don’t have to.

This point was made in some way at nearly every session I attended. Engaging with the public is the same no matter what tools or channels you use. And that will never change, regardless of which social network is hot next week, month or year.

“ROI of Social Media” panel at CoLoft in Santa Monica.

Everyone is still learning

No one has the magic answer to social media success. The session “ROI in Social Media” was lead by four smart and fun panelists, including digital marketing expert Stacey Soleil, SEO guru Constantine Roussos and technology analyst Dan Benyamin.

The panelists reeled off numerous ways to track the performance and prove the success of digital campaigns. Some methods I knew about, including using Google Analytics to evaluate social media referrals. Other services, like social media analytics software ViralHeat, I’d never heard of.

Some I agreed with, such as recording the increase in engagement on individual channels across all social networks. Some I didn’t, like viewing the raw number of “mentions” in isolation. But the key takeaway was that even social media professionals are constantly learning about the industry and how to work within it.

There are no facts in social media

This point ties in with the previous one, but I thought it important enough to separate. During the event, I was engaged in a brief Twitter conversation regarding the necessity of stories.

The gentleman I was tweeting with disagreed with the speaker’s premise and tweeted, “it’s fact that you won’t achieve marketing goals via social media unless you engage your audience in conversation.”

While I agree with this statement, all I could think about was his use of the word “fact” and how there are no facts in social media. That’s what makes it fun and challenging and exciting. And that’s why the second lesson – the need for flexibility – is so important.

I appreciated the variety of topics, venues and speakers at Social Media Week LA, and enjoyed meeting so many smart, talented and motivated people. When the majority of your social interactions are done online like mine are, it’s always nice to meet other social media enthusiasts in person and communicate in sentences that are longer than 140 characters.

Brazil has the highest percentage of social media users in the world. By the end of last year, more than 67 million Brazilians – that’s 35 percent of the population – had access to the Internet, according to Nielsen. Of these wired Brazilians, 38 million spent an average of 71 hours a week on the Web, and 80 percent visited blogs or social networks such as Google’s Orkut, Brazil’s answer to Facebook.

Buying a house? There’s an app for that

These numbers are extremely enticing to companies who invested R$1.3-billion (more than US$700-billion) in the Web last year. Tecnisa was the first construction company in Brazil to do business over the Internet and the first in the world to sell an apartment – worth R$500,000 – via Twitter.

With 35% of its sales originating online, the company has already closed 38 deals through Twitter, where they have 6,000 followers, and two deals through their iPhone application in the last year. One customer took just four days to buy an apartment through the app.

Tecnisa has a long-standing relationship with the Internet; in 2005, it was the first Brazilian company to launch a corporate blog. Romeo Busarello, the company’s Internet director, says the Web is about building relationships as well as ROI.

“The Internet is not the end, but the channel for us,” Busarello said. “The social networks help us with brand monitoring, competitive intelligence, public relations and customer care. We engage with neighbours, stockholders and bloggers.”

Free delivery in 140 Characters or less

Engagement was also the goal of Pizza Hut of Rio Grande do Sul, which received more than 80 suggestions for new pizza combinations on Twitter during a recent promotion.

The five best recipes were put to a vote on the franchise’s website. The winner – a combination of beef, pork, cheese, oregano and barbecue sauce – garnered 1,746 votes and was added to the menu as the “Twitter Pizza.”

Fun with magazines

Like their counterparts around the world, Brazilian media brands are also striving to reinvent themselves online.

Ediouro, publisher of the crossword puzzle and hobby magazine Coquetel, transformed its website into an interactive gaming portal. The new site gets 2 million visits per month, has led to increased magazine subscriptions and, most importantly, refreshed the brand’s image.

“Crossword puzzles are victims of the digital age, of the mobile phone and the absence of free time,” said Robert Cassano, the strategy director for Frog Agency, which spearheaded the Coquetel rebranding. “For print media, digitalization is both the death and the salvation.”

The lesson here is that brands ought to offer customers a space to connect with each other and communicate with the brand. That’s why the new world is about return on engagement, not just return on investment.

“Social networking involves understanding the consumer broadly, talking to them individually, and mobilizing those brand advocates,” Cassano said.

Facebook of Brands

These days, 70 percent of Brazilians use Orkut to interact with brands and each other. But a group of local executives is trying to empower consumers with a new website called Drimio, which is the first social network focused exclusively on the customer-brand relationship.

Marketing specialist, Gil Giardelli, says that Orkut used to be a space for consumers to create communities and publish their opinions about brands. But then the brands themselves started using it to publicize their services and silence critics.

“Most companies use social media to publish content, recruit brand advocates and then start selling,” Giardelli said. “But the first step is to practise radical transparency, in which all decision making is carried out publicly.”

Drimio allows members to follow companies, publish information about them and share their brand experiences with other customers. Drimio puts customers back in the driver’s seat.

Meanwhile, at Pizza Hut, here comes one more Twitter Pizza for someone wrapped up in a crossword puzzle or checking out a new apartment – all on the Web, of course!

I may have gone about the Ebert Club all wrong. I dreamed it up myself. Even the members say they would have paid more. I’ve hired a Club secretary, the Canadian artist and film devotee Marie Haws, who does a lot of the heavy lifting (and the art and creative) on the newsletter, so the result is a lot more than just some stuff I throw together.

Before starting the Ebert Club and your blog, you were a renowned TV personality. While your fans read your reviews online or in print, many got to know you from At the Movies. How can any other journalist or news outlet gain the same kind of following without that kind of exposure?

I realize I was lucky. But I recently wrote a blog entry, “The Golden Age of Movie Critics,” about very good critics emerging on the Web. One think that helps me is that I have a database of thousands of reviews going back 42 years, and I get maybe 200,000 visits a day from people linking to reviews from IMDb, etc. In many cases, I will have one of the few reviews of a film, or the only one.

From the comments on your blog to your Twitter followers and Ebert Club members, you’ve been able to amass a lot of information on your niche, and all without imposing a single survey on your readers. What have you learned about your audience? Who are they?

I’ve learned about them from 50,000 comments. They are very interested in movies, intelligent, and good writers. I vet every comment, and am amazed by their high quality. Perhaps 25 percent of my visitors are from foreign countries. They write better English than a lot of native speakers.

As a film critic, you’re accustomed to handling dissent from the public. Can someone like Richard Branson or any CEO of a major corporation (BP comes to mind) be expected to react to backlash in the same way that you do? How should they handle it?

Be forthright. By attempting to minimize the oil spill and improve its image, for example, BP has spent millions on PR with result of increasing distrust and suspicion. Let’s face it. Its image is screwed. They should accept that and make more of an effort to at least SEEM to tell the truth. They’re worried about the BP parody account on Twitter being mistaken for the real thing. Doesn’t that tell you something?

How much of an effort do you make to maintain your image in a public discourse? Does the idea of a “personal brand” even enter your mind?

No. “Branding” for me is like the practice of calling a city a “market.” I write, people read.

With your blog, you make a point of personally approving each comment before it’s posted. On Twitter, you play “Tweeto,” where you end the night by posting three retweets from new followers. How do you find the time to keep your followers and fans engaged?

To be quite honest, my illness has helped. Having lost my power to speak, writing is my means of communication. Twitter is like a running conversation, and is cheering to me. The blog has taken on a life of its own. I feel a real connection with its readers. I took a lot of heat over the blog about video games, and a lot of it was justified. But it generated 4,366 comments and 1.2 million words, and certainly inspired a useful discussion, because those comments are longish and thoughtful, not snark.

What are the most valuable features of news, or even film criticism?

I want to know what’s happening, and I enjoy good writing for its own sake.

Read Part I. Ebert talks about his forthcoming memoir, eBooks, and the future of print.

Photo by NASA Goddard Photo and Video via flickr

Inform

In tense, time-sensitive circumstances travellers turn to social media for information. The most effective tweets and status updates read like newspaper headlines: clear, concise and timely. KLM Royal Dutch Airlines has been particularly good at this, using Twitter to send out frequent updates filled with re-booking tips, location-specific information, and links to more detailed content. No wonder the brand gained more than 4,000 Twitter followers in the past week!

Reassure

Between news updates, some airlines are reassuring customers that there is a light at the end of the tunnel. Brussels Airlines addresses stranded passengers who may be worried about angry bosses or missed exams. Meanwhile, Lufthansa is keeping its customers’ hopes alive by re-tweeting passenger success stories while staffing up in airports and call centres.

Engage

Some airlines are going a step further by responding to customers personally. KLM’s Twitter feed is littered with @replys (individual responses to customer questions, comments and concerns) in both English and Dutch.

But some of the best engagement is taking place on Facebook, where customers and airline staff have more space to share stories, advice and sympathy. Lufthansa has been using Facebook to post updates and converse with fans throughout the week. KLM (can you tell we’re impressed with them?) has a “Volcanic Eruption” Q&A sidebar on its Facebook page and helpful staff members answering questions around the clock.

One of Facebook’s strengths is that it encourages customers to engage with each other. Like friendly passengers bonding in an airport lounge, people are using branded pages to exchange war stories, share information and even offer stranded strangers a place to crash.

Of course, Facebook and Twitter also provide ample opportunity to criticize and castigate an airline brand on its own turf. But losing control is inevitable in the digital age. And for the most part, all it takes is a touch of humanity to turn a disgruntled customer into an appreciate fan or follower.

The Kevin Smith affair generated tons of media coverage, much of which wasn’t very kind to Southwest. What was the biggest lesson of that experience?

I think there were several lessons learned here. We have over a million Twitter followers, a strong presence on Facebook and our blog, filled with great advocates that love what we do. We have all these channels in place and they’re very robust. But these channels didn’t get to Kevin Smith the way they would to a typical customer.

If this situation happened to someone who didn’t have the volume of tweets coming back at him, we might have been able to defuse the situation a little bit more efficiently. But with the sheer volume of content online, I’m not even sure he saw that we were reaching out to him via Twitter. That was one of the issues.

But honestly, trying to engage a person online who doesn’t necessarily want to engage online back was a challenge. With most people, if you say, “please DM [direct message] me,” they see that and they do, and you’re able to solve their customer service issue right then and there. That wasn’t the case on that Saturday night.

I think another lesson was learning to know when the conversation was over. I think we did the right thing there. We came out, we apologized, we stood by our policy and we acknowledged that it was implemented incorrectly (in our second blog post). We refunded all of his travel. And then it was over for us.

But when we ended the conversation, it wasn’t necessarily over for him. And that’s fine – to let him have his time to vent, to talk to his audience, and have a voice, that’s perfectly acceptable.

You guys have cultivated a very distinct personality through your blog, tweets and YouTube videos. And the title of your initial blog post, “Not So Silent Bob,” had that cheeky voice your customers recognize. It was very on-brand. But some people perceived it as “snotty,” because they weren’t as familiar with that voice. Do you think you misread your audience here?

I think that’s exactly right. We used our typical voice in that first blog post and now we’ve gone back and realized maybe that wasn’t the appropriate voice. Maybe we need to look at that a little more thoroughly – the title, all that stuff with more of an outside perspective. We’ve gone back and done “lessons learned” and case studies already, and that was one of the things we looked at, making sure that voice is appropriate for a Southwest audience that gets us and loves us, but also an audience that isn’t as familiar with who we are as a company.

Was this an instance where a more old-fashioned, corporate press release-style voice would have been more appropriate?

Yeah. And we’ve had that feedback. That was the other really interesting thing about this. I saw everything that was posted online about us – the good, the bad, and the ugly. And it was a huge learning opportunity for all of us. But I think not just us, but a lesson for every company who has an online presence, and every person who’s sitting on the other end of some really hateful tweets about how to handle this. And to expect it.

What’s your take on how the media treated the situation? Do you think they were fair and balanced about the whole thing?

It’s tricky. I think a lot of them didn’t get all the facts. People are pretty speedy to report these days on blogs, on social media, on all channels. I even saw some blog posts where people were saying that if they were me they would have had that first blog post approved before they posted it and I’m like, “Really? You think I didn’t get that approved!?” But when you get down to the meat of the story, I think most of the reporting was right.

Have you personally spoken to Kevin Smith? Where did the relationship leave off?

For us it ended Monday. This all happened Saturday night. Sunday I posted my first blog post. And then Monday we were actually able to get the right phone number for him. Because a lot of – I hate to use the word – celebrities don’t have the right phone numbers in their reservation. It’s their assistant or talent company or whatever.

So we finally got the right phone number for him and were able to reach him and our VP of communications had a great conversation with him about the policy, how we implemented it wrong. And then we came out with that final blog post. And for us that was the end factor. He wasn’t quite satisfied with that final blog post but we were.

Southwest has set the bar high for airlines using social media to communicate with customers. But have you set impossible expectations now that people expect you to be accessible 24/7?

Part of our job is managing those expectations. But to be really truthful, I personally don’t feel we can offer our best customer service via Twitter. I think we can be alerted to customer service issues via Twitter but more often than not, if we see an issue on Twitter, we take it via email or some other medium where we can really dig in.

We’re also blessed with being a domestic carrier so we don’t have red-eye flights. Our timeframe is a little bit different than some of our competitors just because we don’t fly internationally. Our Twitter operating hours are about 5 a.m. to about 11 p.m. and we’ve gotten to a place where we encourage all our employees who use Twitter to be monitoring. A lot of them even have my phone number. So we’re a big group of Southwest eyes looking out.

How has Southwest’s massive social media presence generated some ROI for the airline? How do you measure success?

More than anything it’s allowed us to communicate with customers in spaces that they’re communicating in already. We’ve had these kinds of excited fans since the ‘70s, it’s just the ways they’re sharing their excitement that’s changed. Having tools like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and our blog allows us to see and share all that content with everyone else.

In terms of metrics, we’ve done some source coding, which gives us a picture of who is clicking through our tweets or Facebook status updates to Southwest.com, and then maybe making a purchase. That’s something that we look at but it’s not necessarily driving our strategy of being online.

For the full feed, follow us on Twitter. Here is our iPhone “tweetphoto” shot from within the 900-plus audience:

Brian Simpson and Adam Wallace at the 140 Conference in LA by CC Chapman via Flickr

I met Adam Wallace and Brian Simpson at the BlogWorld Expo in Las Vegas, and the story of our introduction also tells the story of Roger Smith’s success.

It all started with Krista Parry. We were sitting at the back of a panel on travel blogging, crouched over our laptops next to the room’s only power outlet. Krista started telling me about Snow Mamas, the content marketing blog she curates for Park City Resorts in Utah. I showed her Sparksheet, and she told me there was someone at the conference who I really had to meet: Brian Simpson from Roger Smith Hotel.

Brian has served in the food and hospitality industry for over 20 years. A year ago he was diagnosed with a severe case of cancer and spent six months in chemo wards. While recovering, he found comfort and community on Twitter. After he left the hospital he quit his job at the Plaza Hotel and hooked up with Adam Wallace who was starting to do some innovative stuff with video and blogging for Roger Smith Hotel.

I had the chance to hang out with both Adam and Brian in Vegas. They came off as genuinely nice guys who understand that business, marketing and hospitality are all fundamentally about relationships. I don’t think we ever even exchanged business cards. It wasn’t until I got home and on Google that I realized just how engaged and influential Roger Smith really is.

The hotel has over 4,000 followers on Twitter, 1,200 fans on Facebook, 13,000 channel views on YouTube and 3,000 items in its Flickr stream. It’s been patronized and praised by celebrities and influencers like Chris Brogan, Mitch Joel and Gary Vaynerchuck and has established itself as the go-to hotel for wired Transumers. They even have a special rate for bloggers.

Why target this demographic? Adam explains it this way: “If we have 50 teachers from Maine stay at our hotel, they go back up north and that’s it. Social media people spread the word.”

Roger Smith has leveraged its midtown Manhattan locale to build a virtual community of brand evangelists. They hold a monthly social media breakfast and regularly host events and meet-ups with companies like Sprouter and 1938 Media.  “We’re a hotel, we’ve got something a lot of brands and marketers would love to have,” Adam says. “A real life connection center.”

The hotel uses social media to lure people into its space, and then broadcasts the hotel’s “stories” back out into the world. Their blog, Roger Smith Life, is filled with videos, photos, event recaps and art from the hotel gallery. “Content has been the backbone of what we do for a long time,” Adam says. “It’s about telling people’s stories.”

And that’s the lesson of Roger Smith Hotel. As we friend, follow, and connect with more people online than ever knew before, our thirst for real world relationships and encounters is only fueled. Once travel brands become trusted facilitators and matchmakers, the marketing takes care of itself.

“Krista was so excited to introduce us, ‘Oh you two just have to meet,’” Brian tells me, as we reminisce about Vegas. “Social media itself is not a business plan. It’s about connecting people.”

Ultimately. this is a story about a brand that grasped the power of new media very early on. They’ve filled a key niche, fostered real relationships with influential people, and reaped tons of free publicity—and customers—as a result. Notice how no one ever talks about Roger Smith’s rooms or amenities? It’s all about people, and the incredible power of good will in brand perception and success.

@RSHotel Twitter Feed

©istockphoto.com/Katrina Brown

Social media has blurred the lines between marketing and friend-making.

Consider the wording that social networking sites use.  When you hook up with someone on LinkedIn it’s called a “connection.” The term elicits a feeling of old-school business success based on the size of your Rolodex. Now consider Facebook, where every connection made is a “friend.”  That word brings up emotions of shared experience, understanding and camaraderie. Finally, leap into the world of Twitter and you will find yourself with “followers,” a term that carries the weight of authority and relevance and brings us into the world of social media stardom.

In marketing getting a star to endorse your product is big business.  Think of William Shatner and Priceline, U2 and the iPod, or even Bill Cosby and Jell-O. Companies look to celebrities to link their product to someone the consumer will know and trust.

Here’s the good news: with social media you no longer need the big celebrity endorser as a middle man. Your company can be the star, with thousands of followers who respect your brand and love your product.

Take Southwest Airlines, for example. At the time of this writing the airline had almost 80,000 Facebook fans and 750,000 followers on Twitter. Southwest also has a presence on Flickr, LinkedIn, and YouTube, and its own innovative blog.  Recently Southwest’s social media gurus energized their Twitter followers with a contest, the prize being a two-night stay at the Napa Valley Marriott Hotel & Spa and used the hashtag #wineswa to promote it.  To top it off they used their “Red Belly Radio” podcast to announce the winners. That’s a huge amount of good publicity at relatively little cost. And no celebrity was harmed in the making of their success.

Of course, the simple fact that a brand has thousands of Twitter followers does not make it a star. Here’s where social media stardom diverges from celebrity— you need to follow your followers, friend your friends and connect with your connections. Customers won’t follow you blindly. They will be vocal and they expect a two-sided conversation.

Let me tell you a true story.  A weary traveller showed up at her hotel late at night and stood in line for over an hour waiting to check in. Disgruntled, she logged into her Twitter account on her phone and sent out a message into the virtual soapbox known as the Twittersphere: “Can you believe this–a four-star hotel, 12 at night, no manager, can’t check in . . . insane.”

Someone was listening. The staff at another hotel located a block away said it would gladly accommodate her, and even take care of any cancellation fees. Not only did the customer pick up her bags and leave, so did the three other people that were waiting in line. In this case there were two social media stars created, the hero and the villain.  Which one do you want to be?

Plus, a self-professed airplane geek shows off his collection of Southwest Airlines (@southwestair) cocktail napkins and Virgin Atlantic (@VirginAtlantic) earns passenger props for its Guns n’ Roses playlist.

Favourite Airline Tweets: Week of July 20

©istockphoto.com/Simon Oxley

Travel is a social activity. You meet people you wouldn’t otherwise meet. On a business trip, you hang out at your hotel bar and meet others doing the same thing. You strike up a conversation. Sometimes, you stay in touch. Every business trip is really a trip to meet someone. Business is, in the end, the art of the honest handshake.

So it’s not really surprising that the social aspect of travel has morphed into social networking. Sites like FlyerTalk are not just message boards about airlines and airports but also places where people “meet” and talk and, eventually, socialize. Friends are made, alliances are formed, plans are hatched. Travellers are a tribe, a group of people with common interests and problems, a real community. FlyerTalk makes this obvious.

Dopplr is another site that announces where you are at any given time to a wide range of people, some of whom you might not even know. My Dopplr account is hooked up to my Facebook account, so anyone who cares knows where I might be on any given day. (This might seem an intrusion of my social space, but how is it intrusive if I’m the one advertising my whereabouts? If I don’t want people to know where I am, I don’t post. It’s like turning your ringer off on your cellphone.) On Facebook, you can tell people where you’ve been, where you dream of going, where you’ve eaten, what you pack, where you buy stuff on your travels. The endless number of applications built around travel speaks to our desire to see the world or, if we can’t, to experience it vicariously through others. What these sites do is something many are calling “intelligent networking.” Our business trips are often networking opportunities, and the Internet has allowed us to network without leaving our desks.

On Twitter (yes, I’m on this as well; makes me wonder how I get any work done), anyone who is thinking about travelling announces it to the world. The “tweets” come in waves when someone is actually on the road; it’s almost as if you’re travelling with them, and, in a sense, you are. From Twitter you can link to a site where you’ve uploaded your photos, so your followers can see what you’re talking about. Go to Flickr, another photo-sharing site, and you can sort through millions of vacation photos from all over the world.

Why are we doing this?

Well, what’s the first thing you ask when meeting someone who’s been away? How was the trip? Because travel is social. You want to know the story. Even of someone you’ve just met.

“Watching” others travel allows us to construct our own stories in our minds. Every traveller has something to relate, no matter how mundane the reason for travel, and every anecdote has the potential to illuminate and entertain. So whether I’m following someone’s tweets or meeting someone in person after having met them online, my own personal narrative is nour­ished and grows – again, just like what travel itself does for me. And if this social travel allows me to grow my network and even wins me new business? Well, that’s about as intelligent as networking gets.

Originally published in Air Canada‘s enRoute, published by Spafax.

©istockphoto.com / Emrah Türüdü

What do we mean when we talk about media today?

I think when we talk about “media” today, the word that normally follows it is “fragmentation.” There was a point when media was an expensive concept. The ability to have a message that you could broadcast to even a small group of people had many barriers to entry for the average person, and so we subsidized it through advertising. If you look at what the Internet has done – bulletin services, then the idea of a GeoCities website where you can build your own webpage, then blogging and podcasts and down to Twitter – what you’re looking at is a landscape that is making it easier for people to publish their thoughts to the world, and by publishing their thoughts, to have an audience. There is still a mass-media model, but there is also a me-media model, where every individual who has anything from a social network to a blog or Twitter account is actually broadcasting or creating media.

Is it ironic that all this is happening just a few years after we were all worried about the concentration of media ownership?

I actually think about those moments a lot. Being Canadian, and having a background in the music industry, there’s always the whole question of whether CanCon [Canadian content regulations] worked. The answer is almost, who cares? Media now has a global base, or can have a global base. And the global base is almost irrelevant. I produce this podcast called Six Pixels of Separation and I call it the audio community – people can call in and they leave their message, and I broadcast it on the show. On any given show, you’ll hear people from Singapore, Russia, the States, Canada. At first, you’re like, “Wow, that’s crazy, there’s somebody in Australia,” and then after a while, it doesn’t really matter because you realize that’s almost as stupid as saying, “I sent Arjun this e-mail and then I sent this e-mail to my buddy in Singapore and they both got it, isn’t that crazy?” You don’t really have that frame of mind when it’s digital; it’s like, well, no kidding it got there.”

Is there such a thing as the media getting so diluted that it doesn’t matter any more? Or is that even a “who cares” question?

First, we need to understand that there is huge value in real journalism and real creation of media that goes beyond me filming a dog licking a bowl of peanut butter and putting it up on YouTube because it looks like he’s talking. But we’re all lumping it into media. But we also need to be aware of something we call “the attention crash.” At what point, having all these access points and feeds, do you just shut down and go numb? I think Twitter is a little lightpost saying, “That’s the whole thing – you’ve got to get shorter, smarter, quicker, and understand that it’s disposable.” We call it “snackable” content. Now, we can say, is that a problem to society? I think they said the same thing when video games came out, like, “This is going to kill kids’ attention spans.” What we actually saw was great leadership come from that generation, great hand-eye coordination, great problem-solving skills.

I was listening to someone compare where we are now with the Internet to the beginning of TV and how, at the beginning of TV, you basically had people doing radio dramas, but with a camera. And it took TV a while to figure out that you could actually do something more than just have two people standing in front of a mic with scripts in their hands doing a show. And he said that’s where we are with the Internet, which is probably the first media that affects every single bit of media because it can do audio, it can do video, it has words so it affects the print. So, I guess we’re sort of at Internet media 1.0 and we’re at Web 2.0 – when we get to Web 3.0, what happens to online media?

I heard a great quote yesterday from Chris Anderson, who’s the editor of Wired magazine and the author of the book The Long Tail. Someone asked him about the future of print and he said: “Where print adds value to the Internet, it will remain.” I’ll also go back to something Clay Shirky said this week at the Canadian Marketing Association’s National Convention. He said, “A lot of people are looking at the web and saying, ‘How does the web fit into the current ecosystem that we have of media?’” And his comment was, “Maybe it doesn’t.” And maybe the Web is its own ecosystem and we have to figure out how the content we used to make is going to fit into this ecosystem.

So, is it a question of us not understanding it or us not having absorbed it yet?

I find the best way to explain it is we’re in purgatory. We’re in this middle stage where we don’t want to go back and we can’t necessarily go forward, and so, several things have to happen. Those include investments, those include divestments, it includes bankruptcy, it includes innovation. I think to a larger degree it involves education. If you think about it, kids go to school and they have books and notebooks and all this sort of stuff; soon they’ll go to work and use a laptop!

I like the image of us being in sort of a media purgatory. Is there any other time in history that is like this one in terms of media? I think back to the invention of the book and Gutenberg and the movable printing press – that took a long time to be disseminated.

In the past we always said, “Content is king,” and the follow-up line is, “Yes, but context is queen” – very romantic, right? The reality is that there’s been a slight shift in this idea that content is everything and we’ve moved towards this world where everything is content. You take a picture of your kids, you upload it to Facebook, it’s content in some way. I think this is a classic case of the inventors not knowing what the invention is for. So, when we had movable type and the Gutenberg press, it seemed clear what you could do with it. Now you realize that’s not so true, because people started publishing magazines and picture books. It wasn’t just about education—it became a matter of entertainment. So we need to remember that it’s very, very nascent. I would argue that the Internet’s only been commercialized in the past 10 to 15 years. I sit down with a lot of newspapers and they’ll say to me, “You know, okay, Mitch, we hear what you’re saying and you’re very, very passionate and you speak very fast about this, but where are the dollars?” And it’s such an unfair question because, how long did it take to monetize the newspaper model? I would argue, as an advertising guy, that it hasn’t been monetized efficiently yet. You’re going to compare something you took 200 years to figure out to something that’s been around 8 years? It’s not even a fair comparison.

Everyone’s been lamenting the end of reading for so long, but it seems we’re reading more than ever because there’s so much media out there.

Well, yeah. People always say, “I’m really worried about my kids, they spend all this time on the Internet.” And I’m saying to myself, when I was a kid I used to come home, plop my school bag down, and sit in front of the TV watching Batman until I was drooling. I look at my 14-year-old niece on a tablet – forget a laptop, she’s on a touch-tablet – and she’s creating videos with her schoolmates for projects, she’s reading a ton, she’s creating things on Facebook, they’re uploading pictures on Flickr; on top of that, she’s texting in one hand and has her iPod in the other. And, we laugh at that, we sort of go, “Ah, kids today.” But I was never reading or that imaginative or that creative with technology – or just even work – ever in my life. I always argue that I would probably be a much smarter guy if I were growing up now, because I would be reading a lot more.

Well, I think we’re all done.

I’m getting so riled up. I’m sitting here sweating!

Is there anything you wanted to add to finish this conversation?

I think that in order for big, traditional mass-media companies to succeed, they need to understand that they’re still going to make a lot of money – it’s just going to be a significant amount less than what they’re used to. Because if something is everywhere, it loses its value.

And, I wonder if “media” is even going to be the right word…

There are lots of really deep thinkers who are looking at why media was like this in the first place. Well, because of the technological limitations. And if we move away from that, maybe even the base metrics we use for considering media success – reach, frequency, things like that  – will go away. I mean, do reach and frequency really matter if I’m just targeting 100 chief information officers?

Is there any country or place where we’re starting to get glimpses of the future?

In the mobile world, we use areas like Korea as a benchmark. You have people who subscribe, for example, to stories on their cell phones. This device becomes ubiquitous to the point where it’s where all your passwords are stored, it’s your credit card, it’s what you use to watch TV or communicate with friends. A lot of those applications exist in North America, but the adoption isn’t there. In Korea, they never really had a big Internet infrastructure, and so they just skipped right to hand-held. Something I’ve been grappling with is the idea of “The Great Untethering.” The idea that stuff should all be connected no matter where you are. So let’s say you’re watching a TV show on your iPhone and, when you come into your office, it’s already on your other screen, or it’s in your house, or it’s everywhere at once. Like you said, the media, the content becomes air itself. That to me is exciting and interesting and unique – a sort of Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash future.

Here is a sample feed of our favourite tweeters (notice the gold stars next to their tweets), followed by a comprehensive list of airlines using Twitter:

Aegean Airlines: @Airlinesaegeanairlines
Aeroflot Russian Airlines: @_aeroflot_
Aerosvit Airlines: @aerosvit
Air Asia: @AirAsiaDotCom
Air Baltic: @air_baltic
Air France: @Air_France
Air France (UK): @AirFranceUK
Air New Zealand: @AIRNZUSA, @flyairnz
Air North: @Flyairnorth
Air Southwest: @AirSouthwest
Air Tran: @airtran
Aires Aerolinia de Colombia: @Airescolombia
Alaska Airlines: @AlaskaAir
Allegiant Air: @allegiantair
All Nippon Air: @AllNipponAirUSA
American Airlines: @AAirwaves
Anubis Airlines: @AnubisAirlines
Arabian Airlines: @ArabianVA
Asiana Airlines: @AsianaAirlines
Atlantic Air: @AtlanticAir
Austrian Airlines: @AustrianSrbija
BMI Baby: @bmibaby_com
Budget Airlines: @budgetairlines
British Airways (North America): @BritishAirways
British Airways (UK): @British_Airways
Cathay Pacific: @Cathay_Pacific
China Airlines: @ChinaAirlines
Cirrus Airlines: @cirrusairlines
Click Air: @clickair
Continental Airlines: @CO-Air
Corendon: @Corendon
Czech Airlines: @CzechAirlines
Delta Airlines: @Delta_Air_Lines
Dunx Airlines: @DunxAirlines
Eastern Airways: @EasternAirways
Easy Jet: @easyJetCare
Easy Jet: @easyJet
Easy Jet (Spain): @easyjetspain
El Al Airlines: @elal_airlines
Estonian Air: @Estonian_Air
Eurofly Airlines: @Eurofly_Air
Emirates: @FlyEmirate
Fly Be: @flybe
Frontier Airlines (weather and travel updates): @FrontierStorm
Frontier Airlines (latest flight sales): @FrontierSale
Garuda Indonesia: @GarudaIndonesia
German Wings: @germanwings_com
Gulf Air: @OfficialGulfAir
Hawaiian Airlines: @FlyHawaiian
Horizon Air: @horizonair
Iberia Airlines: @IberiaAirline
Iceland Air: @Icelandair37
Iceland Express: @icelandexpress
Indian Airlines: @sindianairlines
JEt 2: @Jet2_com
JEt4You: @jet4you
Jet Blue: @jetblue
Jet Blue (PR CorpComm): @SkyWriter012
Jetstar Airways: @JetstarAirways
Kenya Airways: @kenyaairways
KLM: @klm
KLM (UK): @KLM_UK
Korean Air: @KoreanAir_KE
LOT Polish Airlines: @LOTPolish
Lufthansa: @Lufthansa_DE
Malaysia Airlines: @MAS
Meridiana Airlines: @Meridiana_Air
Mexicana Airlines: @mexicana_com
Mokulele Air: @MokuleleAir
Niki: @flyniki
Pacific Blue: @fly_pacificblue
Passaredo Airlines: @AirlinesPAZ001
Pegasus Airlines: @ucurbenipegasus
Philippine Airlines: @philippineair
Qantas Airways: @QantasUSA
Qantas Airways (travel tips): @QFTravelInsider
Qatar Airways: @qatarairways
Royal Nepal Airlines: @royalnepal
SAS (Norwegian): @SAS_Norge
SAS: @SASGroup
Scandinavian Airline: @FLYSAS_com
SeaPort Airlines: @SeaPortAir
Seeair: @flyseair
Northwest Airlines: @NWAirlines
Singapore Airlines: @SQAirlines
Sky Europe: @skyeurope
Southwest Airlines: @SWAInflightSafe
Southwest Airlines: @southwestair
Spanair: @spanair
Spirit Airlines: @spiritairlines
Sri Lankan Airlines: SrilankanUK
SwissAirLines: @SwissAirLines
TAM Airlines: @TAMAirlines
TAP Portugal: @tapnews
Thai Airways: @ThaiAirwaysAust
Tiger Airways: @tigerairways
Transvia: @transaviacom
Turkish Airlines: @Turkishairlines
United Airlines: @United_Airlines
US Airways: @usairways
USA3000 Airlines: @USA3000Airlines
V Australia: @VAustralia
Virgin America: @virginamerica
Virgin Atlantic: @virginatlantic
Virgin Blue: @virginblue
Vision Airlines: @visiontravel
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Robert Scoble is one of the world’s leading evangelists of all things digital. Previously with Microsoft, Scoble has also worked with Fast Company among others. He is perhaps best known as a blogger: millions around the world read it every day. And one of Scoble’s most famous creations is his starfish, a great, colorful visualization of the amorphous social-media landscape. Inspired by Brafman and Beckstrom’s “The Starfish and the Spider,” Scoble emphasizes the online media ecosystem’s decentralized and interconnected nature. Below, we dissect the starfish, laying out each medium’s strengths and weaknesses and examining which players are converting each into eyeballs and dollars.

Video

Strengths:
youth audience, viral, multiple senses, easy to embed, creativity, control over message
Weaknesses:
production costs, online video not as popular with adults, oversaturation
Services:
YouTube, Google Video, Kyte, Seesmic, Hulu
Conversions:
Politicians and interest groups use video to spread the word. Aspiring musicians and filmmakers can market themselves on the cheap. Grey-market entrepreneurs who provide links to TV shows and movies are making a killing off ad sales.
Who’s making money?
Let’s face it: YouTube will never be the cash cow Google expected it to be. And how annoying are those commercials networks lace their videos with? There is hope, however, in sites such as Hulu, where the big boys get a share of the pie.

Photo

Strengths:
“worth a thousands words,” cheap, easy to share across platforms
Weaknesses:
static, copyright confusion
Services:
Flickr, Zooomer, SmugMug
Conversions:
Citizen journalism sites such as Gothamist and CNN’s iReport are thriving off our Flickr photos.
Who’s making money?
Flickr has stayed afloat with its premium subscriber model but Yahoo suitors such as Microsoft may think they can squeeze more money out of the photo-sharing leader.

Blog

Strengths:
personal, interactive, multimedia, free and easy to use
Weaknesses:
Casual tone can lead to political and corporate gaffes. Many companies are leery about opening themselves to criticism through comments or linking. “Post or die”: maintaining a popular blog is a full-time job.
Services:
WordPress, Blogger, TypePad
Conversions:
Google, Wal-Mart, Amazon, McDonald’s and Whole Foods are among the most powerful corporations with successful. – and surprisingly readable – corporate blogs.
Who’s making money?
Blogs are the lifeblood of what Internet evangelist Jeff Jarvis calls the new “link economy.” According to a Wall Street Journal story, more Americans earn a living today from blogging than firefighting or computer programming (although some bloggers have questioned the Journal’s accounting).

Events

Strengths:
Welcome to the real world.
Weaknesses:
“If you build it, they will come”—except when they don’t.
Services:
Zvents, Evite, Eventful, Upcoming, Facebook
Conversions:
Scoble likes to talk about an unofficial Obama rally that was organized online and drew more than 4,000 supporters – plus the future President.
Who’s making money?
Depends on the cover charge.

Collaborative Tools

Strengths:
internal efficiency, transparency
Weaknesses:
Expensive and buggy. Will our privacy evaporate in a cloud?
Services:
Zoho, Zimbra, Google Docs
Conversions:
Google’s ever-evolving collaboration tools build brand loyalty (not to mention dependency).
Who’s making money?
By keeping its programs in perennial beta mode, Google can scrap unprofitable – or just plain crappy – creations while saving face. What happened to Vista Beta, Mr. Gates?

Wikis

Strengths:
Crowdsourcing, transparency, unabashed geekiness: Wikis are the coolest social media on the block.
Weaknesses:
The hazards of democracy: Wikis are fair game for critics, pranksters and sh*t disturbers.
Services:
Pbwiki, Twiki, Wetpaint
Conversions:
Wikipedia, anyone?
Who’s making money?
Wikis are the NGOs of the Internet economy. They won’t make money, but the geeks won’t let them fail.

Audio

Strengths:
intimate, easy and cheap
Weaknesses:
Radio is so 1930s.
Services:
BlogTalkRadio, Odeo, podcasts
Conversions:
The Quick and Dirty Tips podcast network just keeps growing.
Who’s making money?
Even public-radio producers have embraced mid-podcast advertising, which is somehow less annoying than video ads (how can you not buy a mattress endorsed by Garrison Keillor’s soothing baritone?)

Email

Strengths:
personal and timely
Weaknesses:
spam!
Services:
MediaPost, AWordADay, TPM Daily Digest and other so-called Bacn.
Conversions:
Six months after the election, President Obama is still tapping into his campaign e-mail trove to sell himself to the American people.
Who’s making money?
We’re so used to ads in our inbox, who would mind a few more?

SMS

Strengths:
even more personal, even more timely
Weaknesses:
except for when cell-phone carriers fail to deliver on time
Services:
Communications Channel
Conversions:
Obama announcing his running mate via SMS was a neat idea, but the cat was out of the bag hours before that early-morning text.
Who’s making money?
As if the Verizons and Videotrons of the world needed another revenue stream.

Microblogs

Strengths:
niche, timely, personal
Weaknesses:
limited audience, time-consuming
Services:
Twitter, Jaiku
Conversions:
Freelance writer Daniel Baum blabbed in 140-character form about his rise and fall at The New Yorker – just in time for his new book launch.
Who’s making money?
So far, Twitter is another VC trust-fund baby. But its powerful real-time search capabilities make it extremely attractive to a conventional search engine such as Google, whose results will always be a few steps behind.

Personal Social Networks

Strengths:
It doesn’t get much more personal than this. An advertiser’s dream.
Weaknesses:
Some might think twice before playing in another company’s walled garden.
Services:
Facebook, Myspace Linked In
Conversions:
Facebook has converted nearly every high school and college-aged kid into a computer geek and online consumer.
Who’s making money?
Program developers, online marketers and Mark Zuckerberg have all made a pretty penny from Facebook. But questions about proprietary rights and privacy continue to loom over the site.