Some of my fondest memories are of running down the street, letting my imagination run wild. Whether I was fighting dragons or wandering through a towering forest, the neighborhood was my playground and I could create any adventure I wanted, right on my own street.
Recently, one of my favorite bands teamed up with Google to help restore some of my childhood wonderment. The Arcade Fire's new project, The Wilderness Downtown, uses Google Earth and Street View to let the viewer choose the address for the setting of the music video. While it was really cool to watch this video using my childhood address and my current address, the real fun was choosing some more famous places. You can make the video take place in Times Square, New York, near Rome’s Coliseum, or anywhere else you want.
Google Street View of Times Square and the Roman Coliseum (Credit: Google)
(It’s a Google project, so using Chrome is recommended for the best viewing experience. And be sure to close all programs other than your browser, this thing is pretty resource heavy.)
The ability to customize videos opens a whole new world for personalized entertainment, and user interactivity will no longer be relegated to the video game industry. While this technology is obviously in its infancy, it will allow videos of all kinds to be manipulated based on the specific request of individual customers, and will finally enable mainstream media to become social. Want a movie to take place in your hometown? Want the closing scene to be in the bar you go to every Friday night? How about a soundtrack comprised of your favorite bands? This information is readily available on social networks, and it’s just a matter of time before a studio takes this technology and runs with it.
As you’ll see, some addresses won’t fit the film as well as others. What was the most entertaining address you used to create the Wilderness Downtown?
As all manners of social networking have increasingly pervaded our work lives, it has become commonplace for college graduates to clean up their Facebook profiles prior to applying to jobs. It is generally accepted that anything you put on Facebook can easily become public domain these days. As such, we accept that our name will be googled and our Facebook photos will be scoured by anyone who has any reason to know who we are. However, with the recent news that Germany has banned employers from viewing the profiles of potential hires, privacy concerns are being revisited. With the recent release of Facebook's Places, this may be a very wise step in enabling people to keep their location and activities private and separate from their workplace.
(If you are having any trouble editing your privacy preferences for Facebook’s Places, refer to this excellent guide.)
Taking a step in the opposite direction, AOL has released a new tool that allows parents to monitor their kid’s activity across a variety of social networking sites.
Keeping tabs on children is fine, but the next logical step seems to be a service that will allow employers to monitor the location, activities, photos and friends of each of their employees. While these services are not technically an invasion of privacy, as those being monitored must give consent, an employee won’t have much of a choice if their new job depends on signing such an agreement. If an employer wants to see where their potential hire goes on Friday nights and who they spend their time with, they will be free to do so. In today’s economy, employers hold almost all of the power in hiring negotiations, leaving employees with little choice but to agree to otherwise unacceptable demands.
Mistakes are constantly made on social networks, sometimes with such harsh consequences as losing your job. As always, make sure you understand your privacy settings and set them according to your comfort level.
So where do we draw the line? Should there be a limit to the amount of information employers can view, or have we finally come to the point that we must realize every step we take is public domain and simply act accordingly?
While not surprising given its lack of adoption, I for one am sorry to see it go because I found a use where its internet connected, collaborative platform made for an ideal teaching tool.
As an adjunct professor in the MBA programs at the University of San Francisco, I used Google Wave as the presentation platform in the courses I’ve taught this year. Though more utilitarian than PowerPoint—lacking its graphic capabilities—Google Wave allowed me to include all the students on the Wave, giving them direct access to the content and links, all in real time, both during the class and at home.
At the same time, I encouraged my students to add their own relevant content, add their own goals and questions, and to dialog on the Wave with me and other students. To facilitate lively classroom interaction, I asked my students to post their homework assignments to the Wave, for both presentation and discussion. Not only did this give me a permanent record of their work, it allowed for healthy peer evaluation. This approach proved to be a terrific collaboration tool, involving the students in the course more directly than traditional presentation methods.
Having the opportunity to easily embed web links was another a cool aspect of Wave as a presentation platform. Jumping from presentation content to a YouTube video, to a website, to a PowerPoint document, and then back to the text, was as easy as one click.
Perhaps had Google been more instructive in its own marketing of Wave, rather than let users try to figure out the best use applications on their own, their results would have been different. Or, as many suspect, Wave has been an experiment in Google’s internal journey to launch its own social network platform. In the meantime, I plan to use Google Wave in my classes for as long as it’s available. Then, may it R. I. P.
We are really pleased to be working with Visa on the launch of Rightcliq™ by Visa. A key feature of Rightcliq is Wishspace™, a visual wish list that lets consumers collect, organize and share images of products they’re considering purchasing by creating bundles. Here is a video overview:
Rightcliq has a lot of great features, and for the last few months our team has been busy creating all kinds of bundles in our Wishspaces. One of the Socialarc team's favorite features is the Get Advice page:
We would love for you to send some cool bundles our way! And let us know what you think.
If you’ve been around the digital space for any period of time you’ll be aware of the debate (controversy) surrounding the efficacy of banner advertising. Joe Marchese, writing for Mediapost, did a great job of framing this in his follow-up post to “Buying Banners = Burning Money”:
“The issue seems to be the industrywide perception that while there may be a variance in quality of impressions, enough quantity can make up for it. What I am saying is that even an infinite number of meaningless impressions will deliver meaningless results”
Socialarc lives in the audience engagement world, so you would probably expect us to agree with Joe...and we do. The challenge is that audience engagement isn’t always scalable the way a digital ad campaign is. That puts Marketers in a tough place. They have digital dollars to put to work.
There is a better way to optimize online ad spend. We’ve been working with a few forward thinking media companies and clients optimizing the intersection of paid and earned media. By leveraging ad spend into audience engagement strategies the client gets digital reach in the right places and meaningful audience engagement.
Implementing these custom programs takes work, but leveraging paid media to gain an earned media advantage makes the most out of the spend and delivers real value to the audience.
