December 17, 2008, K&L Gates’ gorgeous, white, marble offices played host to MITX: Planning Your Online Video Strategy 2009. I sat in on an amazing session that was well worth far more than the price of admission. There was a perfect blend of technologists, analysts and practitioners. The session was unselfishly and actually was beautifully moderated by Will Richmond of VideoNuze. He masterfully kept the conversation flowing.

The session confirmed what I suspected; 2009 is the year of video. Nimble companies like Hubspot.com spent 2008 paving the way, showing people the power of communication through “under-produced” content. Mike Volpe of Hubspot contended that he would rather do 100 (under produced) videos for $10,000 than 1. And this is what 2009 is about.

Companies are going to try to figure out ways to act more like people. One to one marketing has traditionally been about customization of message for a particular audience using matrices and models. Social Media technologies make actual human contact and conversations practical and scalable and inexpensive. Sure, a commitment is necessary and I did not say it would be easy, but the relatively low cost of technology, combined with creativity and dedication to the scene will allow companies to adopt strategies based on a range of video content: under-produced content, produced and a percentage will even delve into non-linear video.

James McQuivey of Forrester agrees, asking: How do corporations act more like individuals? Can they be more comfortable with the personal, lower quality approach? Corporations need to do do this. He also reminds that this is not a put-all-your-eggs-in-one-basket strategy, but an approach to one marketing channel.

It’s measurable. It’s consumable. It’s understandable. It’s doable!

According to Volkswagen’s RoutanBabymaker3000, powered by Oddcast, this is what Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama’s daughter would look like. She’s a cutie!

And here’s their son. He’s a dashing young lad.

This thing is brilliant. I don’t know if it will sell minivans, but it will get people talking and making babies. Impressions Impressions Impressions!

11/27/2008 - Thanksgiving Day and my baby girl’s first birthday.

The family woke up at 8:00AM highly anticipating: Jaye’s pumpkin muffins, turkey, cranberries, Nana’s gourmet mashed potatoes with squash (and cream!), Nana’s traditional yam casserole with oatmeal and cranberries and marshmallows, (which let’s face it is a richer version of apple crisp that we pass off as a side dish) string beans, creamed onions (which never got made this year), two kinds of cranberry sauce which the kids dubbed cranberry relish and cranberry jel-ish, pumpkin, pecan and apple pie, and birthday cake.

Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade

We attempt to watch the parade with the kids, but they are too wound up. The baby goes down for a nap and Jaye takes the other 2 for a walk in the double jogger. I work on belching monkey while the baby zomps. Wife gets back from the walk, the baby wakes up from her nap and we furiously get ready (at the last minute) for overnight at Nana’s which is 45 minutes away.

The Call

Just as we are about to leave, Jaye’s phone rings. Why do we even say that phones ring anymore? Almost nobody’s phone rings. They usually sing or play a song to let us know that someone is calling. My tone for Gregory Ng is a digital sound. Jaye’s is boing-boing-boing. Anyway, I’m still popping a squat on the couch geeking away when I hear from the kitchen: “THE TURKEY IS ROTTEN!”.
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The Motrin product marketing team sat; focused and determined, around the boardroom and pondered new positions that would put them top-of-mind for every(wo)man’s pain relief.  They wanted to let consumers know that their product is the most convenient way to consistently relieve any kind of physical pain for long periods of time.

The question was: “How could this young swat team of Hugo Boss wearing, martini drinking, Wii-playing, Mazerati driving, coed-chasing, millionaire playboys and playgirls get themselves into a state-of-mind that would allow them to truly feel the pain of the consumer?” More Martinis? No. They’ve already discovered Intoxidote. More Late Night Partying? No. They’d been getting by with 4-6 hours of sleep since university.

How would they get into character so that they truly understood the problem? And then it came to them. In order to have their own headaches, they needed to take their cushy, Madison Avenue lifestyles and flip-turn them into massive migraines. Since Pete had been working a lot with Flash of late and since they had been looking for a way to test that social media thing out, they came up with this (below) in an effort to get them into trouble with the top brass and threaten their very way of life:

With Twitter moms enraged and every Google search coming up with scorching disapproval (even it is largely from one small segment of the net), the Chiefs are sure to have their thinkers working round-the-clock thinking of a new spin. Genius! The young guns had done it again. Motrin anyone?

On November 4th, Barack Obama was elected the 44th president of the United States of America.

And at least one person wanted me to let my network know that they were unhappy about it.

Let’s back up. During the election, 1,745,754 people set 4,896,031 statuses that reminded people to vote for either Barack Obama or John McCain.  Given that more than 90% of the people in my network had donated their statuses, I deemed this a good opportunity to buck the trend and set my own status to [STATUS FOR RENT].  the Michael Schneider is a charitable guy, but when it comes to my personal brand, I am a marketer and only willing to whore my status out to a candidate (or anyone else) if they are willing to trade goods, services or currency.

I set my rate to $200 for one hour or $1500 for 24 hours.  Once it became clear that Obama would be elected, one of the McCain supporters in my network told me that they wanted to rent my status and that they wanted me to set it to OBAMA BITES IT.

Given the cut rate negotiated (I wanted to be a pioneer!), I set the rule that I would be able to indicate that I had, indeed, rented my status in the message.

Has anyone else done this? How about being paid to tweet/plurk a message?

In Field of Dreams, Ray Liotta says “If you build it, he will come.” He’s talking about Shoeless Joe Jackson.  People often misquote it as “If you build it, they will come.” I’m one of those people and I’m here to use that analogy to make my point which is this: You can build the coolest, hottest, social-est community on the worldwideweb and it’s going to take a hell of a lot more than launching the damn thing to get people to congregate.

Three Must Haves When Building an Online Community

Promotion

People need to be able to find the thing. Organic search is your friend, but it is also a lot like a Miracle Gro. You will see the benefits, but that tomato you planted today is not going to bare fruit tomorrow. With a little bit of audience analysis, you can target the sites they prefer and put up some banner ads that will assist your paid search.

Seeding

Get some creative people to seed content for you. If you are Staples and you are putting together a new site, it’s a no-brainer to talk to the people who live your brand every day. I would love to see Staples partner with Lifehacker and have them show people their vision for the Speakeasy. I could see Lifehacker with a budget from Staples and a bunch of creative things to do with their products that make life easier. The Speakeasy needs video content, but I do not want to pick on Staples (in this post).

Training

Video is the ultimate new training tool. Throw together a montage of someone using the site. Show the features and be sure to use an inspirational example. Software tools are doing this really effectively right now. In fact, some of them are doing it in lieu of doing anything else.

TRiiPLES from Jeffrey Hau on Vimeo.

Today’s post is by guest blogger Jaye Schneider. Jaye is a freelance quality assurance and hi-tech market research professional who owns a consulting shop called QA Ready. If you are a business owner or agency in need of quality assurance strategy and execution, contact Jaye at jaye.schneider {at} qaready.com.

Recently, I found myself a little bit envious of the 20-something set. Not because of their youth, or their ability to be just starting out with their lives, but because for the majority of their lives they have been connected to all of their friends via the Internet. Thinking back on my days at school, camp and college and all the people that I lost touch with before the Internet makes me a bit sad for the connection that I missed.  Browsing some Generation Y’s Facebook and MySpace pages, I realize that they have not lost touch with people, they have them all in their networks and can re-connect at any time.

However, as I joined into this new world of people networking, I realized that when someone does not care for you in this spectrum, there are many ways for them to show it. Prior to these friendship sites, losing touch could become a passive act; not returning e-mails or phone calls.  A person could fall out of contact with a friend or acquaintance and never know if it was lack of time, disinterest, or true dislike that caused the connection to be broken.  The Internet friendship sites take the guesswork out of losing touch; if someone wants you to know who they are and what they are doing, you are their friend, otherwise, you are not.

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Microsoft Surface may not be about immediate return on investment, unless of course you are Harrah’s, but I think it could give companies who are willing to take the leap into the 21st century a competitive advantage. In my mind Surface can bring 3 things to user experience:

• Efficiency.
• Uniformity.
• Innovation.

Efficiency

Think about the things that drive satisfaction. In a retail situation, you just want the transaction to be correct and expedient.

Uniformity

People don’t like McDonald’s for the food (do they?), they like it because they know that no matter which McDonald’s they go to, wherever the hell they are, they are going to get the exact same thing. That said, they do not have apple pies in China, they have pineapple pies! Brilliant! Surface has the power to bring that uniformity.
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Since Microsoft Surface was introduced in May 2007, I have been excited about the possibilities.  While the coffee table model is cool in a retro-pac-man-in-a-pizza-joint way,  I immediately envisioned form factors from walls to phones to smart cards that can fit in your pocket.

Imagine the walls of your house in Surface. You would have total control of the style of the room from the wall colors, to the artwork. There would be no need to have a television, it could exist whenever you wanted it to and then disappear as artwork, solid colors or maybe even an aquarium.

The placement of your TV would be variable. If you wanted the kids to be able to watch a small “television” in their beanbag chairs, you could drag a small TV down near the floor where they could watch. You could also drag the TV around the wall and modify the size, the shape and even segment into multiple TVs to monitor other channels. Imagine that during sporting events! Who needs picture in a picture?

In the office you could have relaxing scenery that transforms into a conference call command center, complete with charts, stats and live avatars of participants. Want your office to look like a library or a beach? Surface!

One of Surface’s powers is its ability to interact with objects and devices. The examples we see are the camera being set down on the coffee table version and the pictures spilling out. People can then put their Zunes on the table and drag photos onto the Zune. That’s pretty cool, right? It’s true social computing because the Surface does not limit the number of active interfaces, meaning I can drag photos to my Zune while you do the same, at the same time, on the same Surface.

Anyone who knows me knows that I am big on process innovation. Technology is a big enabler for me, however I try hard not to force technology into a situation just because I think it is cool. That said, if we do not start innovating with Surface, we are not going to see its benefit anywhere.

The general sentiment of the blog-o-social web is that the Seinfeld ads were terrible. They produced a sort of anti-buzz throughout that resonated on blogs, twitter, seesmic and vimeo.

In other words, everything went exactly as planned.

Microsoft knew that one of two things would happen. People would love the approach and they would begin a long series of Bill & Jerry ads; or people would think they are terrible and people would begin a wave of criticism and disdain for the campaign, not the product.  In the process, they would tell Microsoft exactly what they really wanted the brand to be and Microsoft would react… swiftly.

The ads were released in early September. This chart shows a spike in Microsoft, Seinfeld and PC related buzz on twitter. Granted, the buzz was generally negative, but if the ads had been funny, people arguably would not have reacted so passionately.

This buzz is consistent across social media properties:

• Microsoft needed to brand themselves for the everyman.
• They needed to remind people that they are crushing Apple
• They needed to explicitly state that it’s OK to do what everyone else is doing
• and that the lion’s share of computing is running on PCs

Loren Feldman of 1938media nailed it.

Coincidence? If you believe that any PR is good PR, then Microsoft got their wish with the Seinfeld ads. They also got a load of free consulting from bloggers, nanobloggers and the media. Shortly after everyone told Microsoft what they wanted, they got it. Seinfeld and the Bill & Jerry campaign were “canned” and “I’m a PC” was born.

Ha ha suckers! Pure Genius. Oh and kudos to Wired for almost realizing that it was all part of the plan.