Crayon, join the conversation

Did everyone happen to catch what happened on Digg yesterday? Short synopsis:

1. User posts code that can crack encryption on new HD-DVDs
2. Post is deleted by moderators in response to a cease-and-desist letter by MPAA
3. Another user posts code in protest at moderation which he sees as Digg seemingly giving in to “the man”
4. Post is deleted by moderators
5. All hell breaks loose

Digg users are traditionally anti-DRM as it is, but coupled with some adsense ads that seemed to suggest Digg was sponsored by the copyright lobby – well, it’s no wonder that for 24 hours every single story on the home page contained the code in question.

The most interesting part of this for me is not that Digg kind of self destructed for 24 hrs as the community rose up in protest, but that Kevin Rose ended the day by posting the code himself and basically saying “what the hell, if we go down, we go down in flames“. And this morning, the whole controversy seems to have subsided somewhat. Whether or not Digg gets sued for not complying with the cease-and-desist, It’s a superb piece of crisis management by the founder – realizing that if your product is based on open conversation, trying to control that conversation is a death knell. Lots of lessons to be learned here.

It’s been a huge couple of weeks for Twitter, the tiny little web app that could, fuelled by the evangelizing of Scoble, and the alpha adopters descending on SXSW to share the latest and greatest. We’ve seen Google mashups, we’ve seen top 100 lists, and we’ve even seen Mr Jaffe enter the fray. No wonder then that today “Twitter” is the most searched term on Technorati.

As I’ve begun to play with it, I’ve found both pros and cons. With Twitter, immediacy of information is balanced with a lot of noise amongst the signal, and sometimes it can prove overwhelming. But Twitter has proved to be a valuable tool in thought clarity – rather than having a blog’s blank field to extend my rambling as long as I want, I’ve begun to realize I HAVE to sum up my thoughts using just 140 letters.

So in that vein, here’s five Twitter thoughts, in 140 characters or less:

You can read my own Twitters here.

Nokia’s multimedia extravanganza, The Passenger, in which you drive through photorealistic settings of Paris armed only with a hands-free multimedia system, teaches us two very important things. Firstly, Grand Theft Auto has completely spoilt us for driving simulations. And secondly, if you invest multiple thousands of dollars in a multimedia talent, make sure there’s at least one proofreader on the team.

While it’s still not ready for primetime, this image could hold a lot of potential for the future, because it’s Second Life running on a cellphone.

Thoughts about the possible applications for this?

This really brought a smile to my day – a video for The Barenaked Ladies featuring a host of YouTube celebrities, including Matt Harding, Brookers, Gary Brolsma and a couple of strange dudes with Diet Coke and Mentos. Anybody think this one will go viral?

As a lot of us here at crayon work remotely, Skype and IM are must have applications, along with collaboration tools like Basecamp, calendar systems, blogging applications and so on.

As a Mac user, I long ago became addicted to Adium, an all in one IM client that allows me to combine AIM, MSN Messenger, Yahoo Messenger and Googletalk into one application. No integration with skype and VoIP yet, but hopefully one day.

Now there’s a new system called imfied, that will allow me to use my IM application to post to Basecamp, blog with both MT, Blogger and Wordpress, and add items to my Google Calendar. I’m only just beginning to explore it but the potential for time saving is huge, and I thought I’d share.

I was just thinking about ROI costs for Anheuser-Busch for Superbowl XLI. Early reports say that the cost of a 30 second spot for the Superbowl was $2.6 million, and that the broadcast attracted just over 90 million viewers. I’m sure not all of those stayed the course for the whole broadcast, but assuming they did, that works out at 26 cents for every 9 viewers per spot.

All AB spots were uploaded to YouTube in one group here. I’m sure they were also probably uploaded by other users too, but even so, many of these spots feature on the top 20 most watched videos for the week. A quick back-of-envelope calculation shows that these spots combined have been viewed over 17 million times since Sunday.

So it looks to me like AB alone has received half a million bucks worth of free media in three days, a figure that will only increase in the next week. And I’m sure all those people who request the YouTube video pay a lot more attention than those at various Superbowl parties.

Props to my good mate Brian at Campfire for turning me on to a viral video that’s turning into something of a media sensation. Sammy Stephens, a local store owner in Florida, created an ad that’s taking YouTube by storm, resulting in his appearance on the Ellen show.

More interestingly, the local newspaper has jumped on the meme and got Sammy to perform his song in front of a blue screen, to encourage mashup mixes and consumer generated re-edits. I can’t wait to see how this progresses.

The Waxy list (one of my favorite feeds) points me to an interesting announcement over on Flickr that really amps up the way images can be tagged. By creating a syntax that can be generated by applications that upload through their API, there’s now an incredible amount of flexibility in the way images can be categorized, searched, sorted and used. This will open up all sorts of possibilities for widget building, and the embedding of community-generated images related to specific locations.

I received an interesting email from Justin Russell about my comments in the last crayoncast about wheresgeorge.com. Here’s an extract:

I’ve been using the site off and on for the last few years, and while I appreciate the creativity of using Where’s George in new ways, it troubles me that the concept of using its features to write a completely fictional history undermines the whole point of the site. The lack of transparency for something like that bothers me, and I’d definitely look unfavorably on a company that used a vehicle like that as a marketing tool if I found that the story turned out to be false.

He’s right, of course. While the few bills I have entered myself will hardly corrupt the database of 98 million they already have, as it was a personal project I hadn’t thought too much about the larger impact this kind of idea could have upon the existing users of the site.

It also talks directly to transparency in marketing, a hot topic at the moment, and one that quickly bubbled to the top at our Coffee with crayon meetup last week. As a Creative Director, I have to admit to some conflicting thoughts on this issue. The strategist and end-user in me abhors corporations’ attempts to deceive. Edelman’s Walmart blog, and Sony’s flog spring immediately to mind, and evoke a “what the heck were they thinking?” slap to the forehead.

Yet, simultaneously, some of my favorite online marketing campaigns of the last few years have involved deceit or subterfuge as part of their contact strategy, notably Sega’s Beta-7 campaign (perpetrated by last Creative Director, Ty Montague) and Mini’s Men of Metal. And while there was little doubt that brands were behind Audi’s Art of the Heist and Sprite and Jeep’s involvement with the Lost Alternate Reality Game, the playbook of the ARG requires the puppetmaster to construct a narrative that, to participants, borders the gray area where they continually ask “wait, is this real, or part of the game?”.

Unbranded teaser campaigns play in this area too, and in the past we, as consumers, have still been able to distinguish fact from fiction due to the prevalence of mass media channels. A magazine ad, due to it’s cost, will always have an advertiser with an objective. But with the rise of consumer generated media channels, citizen journalism and a completely fragmented media landscape, the canvas on which we paint “unbranded teasers” doesn’t automatically betray it’s origin – something that we’ve all learnt from Lonelygirl15.

Does this mean stealth marketing is dead? And in our mission to reform marketing and PR to make it honest and transparent, are we losing a powerful narrative tool? I’d be interested in your comments.