Over a recent re-viewing of a movie trailer entitled “Her”, I began to wonder. The film centers around a man (Joaquin Phoenix) who falls in love with a women. Well the voice of one at least, a computer operating system that interacts with their user in a analytically designed manner.

This made me wonder, with all the conversation going on regarding a more personal and customized approach to online marketing and targeting of consumers is this where we are headed? At what point does are online world become more important than our real world? Consumers are putting more and more of their lives online and businesses are taking note. Never before have companies had the ability to create such effective targeting of consumers using this data. And we love it, I mean if you speak to most consumers they relish in the fact that they can find whatever they what online and are alerted to the fact that their favorite store is having a massive sale.

There are hundreds of thousands of stats that will describe how we are constantly connected, but more effective would be for you to just look around in a 5 foot radius and count the devices that are present. People can witness pictures of the greens of the Amazon or the colorful mosaic of fishes in the Great Barrier Reef from Twitter or Facebook, and all from the comfort of their favorite recliner.

If there is a point to be made her it is that I fear we would rather communicate through a technological medium. Why not, it’s safe, it’s comfortable, and most of all it’s easy; we do not have to experience anything now because some one else has. At what point do we have to create moderation, when I was a kid there were television ads to tell me to stop watching TV. Is this the business or government groups responsibility to help make a change?

In my final though I believe that changes need to be made, we have begun to view people on our social media profiles as faceless tiles. We have “learned” all we need to know about someone before we can truly discover a person. I don’t mean to bash social media, it does good, I mean it has allowed my mother to see her sister over 12000km away in Sydney, Australia. Social media has allowed us to connect with our World like never before in human history, but has it separated us from our neighbors?

Where we left off we were focused on the internal workings of the Make a Wish foundation’s transformation of San Francisco into a sunny Gotham city. There is another equally interesting and fascinating side to the story, that is the community of social media users who rallied around Miles, the 5 year old Batkid.

On Friday when Batkid sprung into action to protect Gotham, social media users instantly took to their respective platforms to share photos, videos, articles and even personas. By 4 p.m. Friday over  10,000 photos had been uploaded to Instagram under the #SFBatkid. Not to mention enough media posted on Facebook to make the 5 o’clock news irrelevant with any coverage of the story.

I would like to mention the aspect of community in all this, as one could infer the Make a Wish foundation is a community within itself, but in this instance it opened up to a larger population with open arms. People responded in any way they could, some went and participated first hand and those who couldn’t participated online join a much broader and expansive community, but a community non the less. All the significant figure in San Francisco took part, from the San Francisco Giants to the coach of the 49ers taking to twitter to cheer on Batkid. Others included previous Batman’s Christian Bale and Micheal Keaton declaring there support and praise for Batkid, Ben Affleck also tweet that Batkid was the best Batman ever! However the real show stopper was President Obama who released a Vine congratulating Miles for saving Gotham.

Amid the teary eyes who witnessed this first hand or followed along online, I was taken aback by the power of the social media community. The force of good and positivity it can provide within our worlds online, something that is often taken for granted in our modern society. Batkid, (and Miles), to me represent the goodness and purity of social media that is often shadowed by commercialism and negativity; one could only hope that we all can one day be as good as the real everyday superhero Miles.

President Obama’s Vine: https://vine.co/v/htbdjZAPrAX

Articles: http://mashable.com/2013/11/15/batkid-instagrams/

http://mashable.com/2013/11/15/batkid-department-of-justice/

http://mashable.com/2013/11/11/batkid-make-a-wish/

The San Francisco Bat Kid is a heart warming tale about a young boy named Miles, he is currently fighting leukemia. Miles has a strong interest, nah a passion for Batman, he adores the caped crusader.

It was his wish to be Batman, even for just a single day. This is where San Francisco Make a Wish stepped in, they had a plan to turn the Bay Area city into Gotham City for the day in order for Miles to serve and protect as Batkid, Batman’s partner.

On Friday, his dream came into fruition, San Francisco became Gotham and Miles became Batkid. His day of serving as the city’s protector led him to saving a women tied to the train tracks by the Riddler, stopping a bank robbery, rescued the Giants mascot from the clutches of the villainous Penguin and ended it all by being handed the keys to the city by the Mayor Ed Lee. All in all just another days work for Batkid.

Though there is much more to this great story, the planning, execution and promotion of the whole day was made possible due to social media.

First of all Make a Wish needed 10,000 volunteers to pull off this feat, so they took to their website and posted an RSVP to all Bay Area residents. Through Twitter and Facebook word spread, it was posted on Monday November 11th and by the Tuesday afternoon it had already reached its goal of 10,000. An interesting note to include is the reach of its message was not limited to the Bay Area, a couple from Ohio bought airline tickets to San Francisco the moment they read about this story in order to be a part of it. It is truly amazing that number of people who showed up did considering the short time frame they worked on. It is definitely an indication of just how strong social media is within our culture and the influence it has within our everyday lives. We have certainly have come a long way from the days of volunteers going door to door or on standing on street corners looking for volunteers.

Articles: http://mashable.com/2013/11/11/batkid-make-a-wish/

http://mashable.com/2013/11/15/batkid-instagrams/

Article: http://mashable.com/2013/11/07/mobile-advertising-wins/

Mashable recently listed four small businesses within the USA that are taking advantage of massive online advertising opportunities. According to 17.4% of web traffic this year is coming from mobile browsing, which is a 6% increase to last year. This leads to a massive audience that has the potential to be segmented into ultra specific categories for maximum targeting.

This is especially important for smaller businesses who lack the physical and financial means to indulge in a mass marketing campaign. Additionally an online campaign will generally work out to be a more cost effective solution.

Mashable listed four companies all using different social media platforms to target their audience.

On Twitter: Rock Creek, a outdoor sports store, used promoted tweets to ramp up their advertising campaign during the holiday season. Their smartest move was offering deals in time bound situation, for example making a sale price only available for 2 days. This give an incentive for users to act quickly and not delay actions.

On Facebook: Karaoke Heroes, a Karaoke Bar chain in the USA, used Facebook ads to target customers after their launch in 2012. Facebook ads was their most cost effective strategy as it allowed to only target the customers they wanted.

There are many options a small business can take to leverage online communities and for the most part these allow for cost saving which are crucial for small businesses.

Everybody has one, some of us multiple…of course what I am talking about is that annoying friend on Facebook. The one who posts self congratulatory posts, boasting of minuscule achievements and complaining about daily events.

The only reason we still keep these people in our circles is that they are a friend or we have some sort of attachment, think of the aunt you have to call every month so your parents will be happy. Regardless of why they are around they still cause a great deal of annoyance, everyday you look for that “final straw” where you can finally delete them guilt free.

Now think, what if this was a company rather than a friend. Are any of us deeply attached to a company in the same way that if they begin to annoy us we will still hang around? Probably not, companies need to be much more self aware of their posted content; it is crucial that they don’t begin to spam their followers and create useless conversations.

This makes a strong argument for displaying user generated content, the content will seem less self congratulatory and therefore can be sent in higher volumes than company made content.

The attached article lists the 7 ways to be Insufferable on Facebook, conversely it lists ways to be “un-insufferable”; most noteworthy for me was “be interesting”. You may ask yourself , how could a household products company be interesting on social media? Well, that in particular is up to the company itself, but in my opinion a good strategy to have would be to challenge your audience, not sitting in complacency and not underestimating the intelligence or involvement of your customers.

M

Article Link: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/wait-but-why/annoying-facebook-behavior_b_4081038.html

This past week Roger Wireless got some…well bad publicity lets say. Huge portions of their Canadian wireless services went down across the country in major cities. Rogers customers were not very happy, to put it in a uniquely Canadian politeness. However, once these “polite” Canadians took to social media and specifically Twitter to air their grievances they instantaneously took up a sailors vocabulary.

Now this sounds like a fairly cut and dry store, Rogers poorly handles a major outage and customers get upset, however there is another layer to this story. You see people tweeted their anger towards @Rogers, problem is the twitter handle belongs to an Australian entrepreneur living in Brooklyn.

Thousands of angry Canadians berated the Brooklyn Aussie, who took it comically and stated that this was in fact not the first time something of this nature had happened before. This story perfectly highlights the need for companies to create a clear and succinct social media plan, which has easy access points for its members to follow and join in. For example, the thousands of people who tweeted @Rogers, i’m sure have not found the proper twitter handle for Rogers wireless and therefore cannot access content or receive important updates.

Funny enough, the man has been asked by Rogers to donate the handle to the multibillion dollar communications company. Understandably he turned down the offer, hopefully he is waiting for a slight increase. In another similar case, CNN paid a twitter user for the handle @CNNbrk, which was used for breaking news updates.

article link:  http://www.vancouversun.com/business/Brooklyn+with+Rogers+Twitter+handle+becomes+focus+Canadian+rage+wireless+network+goes+down/9022753/story.html

link for a good weekend listen; Happy Thanksgiving Y’all

Ron Burgundy has partnered up with Dodge!

Ron Burgundy (aka Will Ferrell) has partnered up with the car manufacturer Dodge in series of new commercials to promote the new Dodge Durango. Although most of the ads will be played on television, they have already received a huge audience online. The most popular ad has received just under 700,000 YouTube views in four days.  This is a good example of leveraging earned media with paid media, the ads have been circulating the web the past few days and will allow for them to be shared to a varied and broad community that may have otherwise missed them on television.

In addition these ads are an effective example of cross-promotion as they also are promoting the upcoming Anchorman 2, which is picking up steam heading towards it Christmas 2013 release date. Dodge effectively leverages the popularity of Will Ferrell and the Anchorman movie to favorably show their new product.  The ads produced in part by Ferrell’s YouTube style website “Funny or Die” will no doubt receive promotion from the site, which specializes in funny sketches. As well the site definitely skews to a younger demographic that will help with overall promotion.

All in all this is destined to be  a very successful campaign and the commercials are destined to greatness…and repeat viewings. By the way you owe it to yourself to watch all of the commercials here: http://www.adweek.com/adfreak/ron-burgundys-hilariously-stupid-dodge-durango-campaign-destined-greatness-152968

In October 2012, Cisco, the networking equipment giant launched a Social Media Listening Centre at its headquarters in San Jose, California. The company, which has 67,000 employees and annual revenue of $48.6 billion, launched the centre in efforts to gain better knowledge of their large customer base. This means that they have to monitor all of their 5000 daily social media mentions across 70 company related Facebook pages, 100 Twitter accounts and a slew of other including Linkedin, Youtube, and company run blogs and forums.

According the research conducted on the listening centre by Nucleus Research, Cisco had a 281% return on investment over a 5 month period which resulted in an annual cost benefit of $1.5 billion. Among it benefits, Cisco had increased staff productivity, meaning that they were able to process and answer customer queries quicker. In addition they note that social media as a whole is a very effective tool to broadcast a message to a large group effectively and in a timely matter.

Personally I believe that this is an incredibly genius idea on the part of Cisco, being as large a company they are and as diverse they are it would be a challenge to satisfy it entire customer base. However with this in place they can effective pay adequate to all of their markets and customer bases. It would be a great irony if a company whose product is networking equipment could not effectively communicate with its customers, luckily for Cisco they can.

“Would you rather fight 1 horse-sized duck or 100 duck sized horses?”

A common question posed of the online community forum known as reddit. Reddit, among its vast amounts of “subreddits” has what is refereed to as an AMA (ask me anything) in which reddit users can ask any question to willing participants. 

As I write this blog entry there are currently AMA’s from a delivery driver from a Sub chain, Vancouver band “Said the Whale” and Robert Reich, a former Secretary of Labour.

Within all of the submissions for AMA’s most tend to deal with “Non-celebrities” who are there for purely a question and answer on a specific topic. However A few times a day someone joins the forum to promote an upcoming project or event, or if they do not have one to simply promote themselves. In recent months A-list celebrities from Woody Harrelson, Morgan Freeman, Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Snoop Lion (nee Dogg) have used the site to promote upcoming projects.

While this format is reminiscent of a traditional interview or late night talk show, the biggest difference is that rarely do the questions pertain to their project, instead most users ask questions regarding personal facts of their lives, previous works and compliments; in response the interviewee commonly respond with little tidbits of their lives and personal anecdotes that have rarely been heard before.

The Over-arching theme of an AMA is honesty, and a lack of promotion. For example Harrelson and Freeman both joined their AMA’s and simply talked about their upcoming films and neglected answering any personal questions; this may work on traditional media but not here. These AMA’s were widely panned and resulted in negative responses to both of their films, however in the case Gordon-Levitt and Snoop they gain popularity for their projects and receive additional promotion through users who experienced positive emotions with the AMA.

In the basic terms an AMA is an advertisement, if the interviewee is honest and engaging users will be more likely to promote the projects within their online circles, however if they are not users will not spread any sources of promotion.

An AMA is a tricky form of marketing, however done right and it can create a personal bond between users and the interviewee, that can result in increased success for an upcoming project.

*Extra* the best responses from Robin Williams AMA this week:

http://www.businessinsider.com/robin-williams-reddit-ama-2013-9

Long gone are the days when decisions on funding would take place deep within the halls on the Universal or Warner Brothers offices. The few division heads deciding on where to allocate millions of dollars to a film  they hope to be a sure thing. However as this last summer has proven, a sure thing just does not exist.

Moving down the budget ladder of the film industry, we finally reach those of the independent variety; many first time writers, actors, directors and producers trying to get a modest product off the ground. If The Sundance Film Festival is any indication, a trend has been growing within the industry where many are turning to independent films to get work, as much larger fare has slowed with succession with economic downturn; the main bill is littered with famous actors and writers.

However even with famous names and talented members most people within the independent industry struggle to find funding to get their idea to the screen.

This is where Kickstarter comes in, a crowd-sourcing website which allows for anyone with a valid idea or propose to seek funding. In recent months however, the site has received a large amount of media attention for a few of its members, namely Rob Thomas and Zach Braff. Thomas sought to fund a movie version of his popular television series “Veronica Mars”, shortly after Braff, of “Scrubs” fame, replicated the idea

Now where does this tie in with marketing you may ask, well not only are these filmmakers trying to sell you on the idea that their film is what that you believe in and is something as an avid film-goer would love to see, they are trying selling you on the benefits and rewards of being involved and investing in the project.  to fund his film “Wish I Was Here”.

Speaking from first hand experience investing in Braff’s project, he made a very honest and sincere appeal to his online community which spans Kickstarter, Facebook and Twitter. Within this message he displayed his reasoning for using the Kickstarter medium; his message of making a quality and uncompromising film is consistent with his endeavors throughout his career. As well the passion he showed throughout really spoke to members as they invested $3.1 million in one month.

In addition, Braff, as did Thomas, released benefits to investors with the minimum being access to a production diary of the film with video updates; benefits ranged up to being a walk-on cast member. With these production diaries in particular Braff has manage to market the film in such a way that it feels like a team effort with all investors being a part. Not only does this bode well for Braff’s image, but it also gives an original film an immediate fan base.

All in all, Kickstarter poses a interesting possibility to many independent filmmakers and is sure to help lift many great films off the ground in the near future.