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Thursday, May 27, 2010
Monday, May 24, 2010
Thursday, May 20, 2010
Overnight Stardom in The Digital Age
This week I came across a very interesting case study from AdAge on how the digital age can make someone a superstar overnight. Greyson Chance posted his clip on YouTube three weeks ago and already has 18,000,000 video views. From average 12 year old kid one month ago, Grayson is now larger than the Jonas Brothers and Lady Gaga.
Let’s take a quick step back. Stories like Greyson’s are so fascinating because they weren't possible a decade ago. This week, YouTube hit its 5th birthday. From a single one-minute long video posted 5 years ago, there is now enough content on the site to watch for 1500 years straight.**
When the Internet (and the rise of AOL in particular) was gaining steam in the mid 90’s, experts proclaimed that the information age had arrived. With the growth of micro-blogging and social media, the new ways we share information in real-time, and how the digital space has evolved over the last year or two, I would argue that only now are we reaching the true potential of the information era. A few years from now, Greyson’s story may not be such an anomaly after all.
Thoughts and resources:
- With the increasingly diminishing privacy barriers, I wonder if we will see a social media/online privacy backlash in the very near future.
- The first ever clip posted on YouTube, titled “Me at the zoo” http://bit.ly/MeZoo1
- **Business daily May 20, 2010
Monday, May 17, 2010
Epic New Nike World Cup Ad
Thoughts and resources:
- Look for this ad to gain some serious viral steam in the coming months leading up to the Wold cup.
- Business Insider article on Nike's viral ad - This Amazing Video is Why TV is Bigger Than The Internet: http://bit.ly/bLLjSi
Friday, May 14, 2010
How much is a Facebook page worth to a brand?
Social media-focused ad agency Virtue has launched a Social Page Evaluator designed to provide an assessment of a brand's Facebook Page value and the effectiveness of its social media efforts. Enter the URL of any Facebook page and the Evaluator will examine its fan count, post frequency and various fan interactions within the page and crunch the data to measure fan valuation and "engagement."
Thursday, May 13, 2010
Explaining Search Engine Marketing to Your Great Grandfather
I recently had an interesting conversation with my 94 year old grandfather. He spent more half of the last century in the advertising industry and is ecstatic that I followed in his footsteps. But, in reality, he doesn't even own a computer, let alone understand how advertisers are utilizing the digital space to reach consumers. I attempted to explain, and he pretended to understand. One thing lead to another and we began to discuss how search engine marketing worked. I used storefronts on a New York City block to describe the process. Thought I would share this to mark a week when we brought two other Stern client's SEM efforts in-house.
I explained to my grandpa that search engine marketing takes place in an electronic marketplace and refers to the placement and location of retailers in a new age market. SEM seeks to increase the visibility of the butcher, tailor, pharmacy, etc.
The heaviest oncoming traffic runs in one direction passing a series of stores. The first store on the closest corner, a butcher, is naturally the first to come into view for those passing by and therefore gets not only the most attention, but also the most business. Because of the butcher’s excellent location, it will have the highest monthly rent. The tailor next door, and each subsequent store on the block will have slightly lower monthly rents due to the fact that they receive less exposure, and therefore less business.
Thoughts and Resources:
- Figured I would completely lose him if I attempted to explain how the relevance of the website in relation to the searched term plays into the equation..
- Google's face lift: http://bit.ly/NewGoog
- More information and a history of search: http://bit.ly/SEMwiki
Monday, May 10, 2010
Google Chrome Viral Campaign
With its newest release of Chrome, Google wanted to show us how fast it is rather than just tell us how fast it is. To do that, they made a Rube Goldberg-ian video showing how fast web pages load in Chrome. And yes, its awesome.
This extremely creative viral video has 1.5 million+ YouTube views in less than 7 days:
Thoughts and resources:
- Convinced? Make the switch like I did at Google.com/Chrome
Wednesday, May 5, 2010
Data Visualization
“Data presentation can be beautiful, elegant and descriptive. There are a variety of conventional ways to visualize data – tables, histograms, pie charts and bar graphs are being used every day, in every project and on every possible occasion. However, to convey a message effectively, sometimes you need more than just a simple pie chart of your results. In fact, there are much better, profound, creative and absolutely fascinating ways to visualize data. Many of them might become ubiquitous in the next few years.”
Smashing Magazine put together a remarkable collection of visualization projects as well as related articles, resources and tools: http://bit.ly/SmashingMag
Thoughts and resources:
- AdAge article on how data visualization is reinventing online storytelling: http://bit.ly/ManyEyesAdAge
- Many Eyes is a free site where anyone can upload, visualize, and discuss data. It is an experiment created by the Visual Communication Lab. Create your own date visualization: http://bit.ly/ManyEyes1
- New York Times article on Many Eyes, Aug. 31, 2008: http://nyti.ms/ManyEyesNYT
All Roads lead to..
When researching data visualization for this week’s blog posts, all roads seemed to lead to the two co-founders of Flowing Media inc, Fernanda B. Viégas and Mark Wattenberg. To put it bluntly, these two are absolute geniuses and THE leading minds in this field.
Flowing Media Inc offers design, strategy and development services, with an emphasis on media and other consumer-facing industries: http://flowingmedia.com/
Before forming Flowing Media in 2010, Fernanda and Mark’s collaborative website, http://hint.fm/, housed many of their projects.
Fernanda B. Viégas
Co- Creator of Flowing Media In, Fernanda B. Viégas is a research scientist and computational designer whose work focuses on the collaborative side of visualization exploring storytelling, collective sensemaking, and online identity.
Mark Wattenberg
Martin Wattenberg is a computer scientist and artist. He founded and managed IBM's Visual Communication Lab, exploring new forms of visualization and how they can enable better collaboration. Wattenberg is known for his visualization-based artwork, which has been exhibited in venues such as the London Institute of Contemporary Arts, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the New York Museum of Modern Art.
A Designer/Statistical Scientist's Playground
FlowingData (No relation to Flowing Media Inc) is the visualization and statistics site of Nathan Yau. He highlights how designers, programmers, and statisticians are putting data to good use: http://flowingdata.com/
- Amazing FlowingData visualization of the growth of Walmart in America: http://bit.ly/Walmart1
Strength in Numbers
“You already just sort of know, logically and instinctively, that Google's got a ridiculous number of servers working for them. That doesn't make it any less mind-boggling when visualized. Get ready for a lot of scrolling.”
Crayola Crayon Count Visualized
Amazing timeline showing the evolution of Crayola's crayons from 1903 - 8 colors to 120 colors today.
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