What is your brand? Or what is brand? Google Doodle
Google unleashed a phenomenal interactive Doodle to celebrate birthday the 96th birthday of Les Paul, the American maker of the solid body electric guitar.
Google’s interactive homepage enabled user to play the strings with their mouse pointer, record, play back, and when finished recording, provided a link to your saved recording.
Pressing innovation in user engagement and in the meaning of “brand”, Google hosted the Les Paul Doodle up for two days.
Stand Alone Site
A real traffic driver? You betcha! The Les Paul Doodle drove enough interest it logged over 5,350,789 hours on launch day, Thursday. This does not include its Friday presence usage.
What is your brand?
Your brand. Is it the image you want people to see? Or is it the experience itself you can provide over and over again? Think Coca Cola, Maxwell House, Nike, Campbell’s Soup or Volkswagen. The images these brands left are self-experiential: where were you when you had your first coke? How do Campbell soups make you feel? Which coffee really is “good to the last drop”? What does a pleasurable driving experience feel like?
Google takes driving internet traffic and branding to a new state-of-the-art form, when a brand can focus its “image” as the engaging experience itself Be it entertainment or other, the point is to be authentically engaging.
“Web 2.0 brands are on the way in, and Web 1.0 brands
are threatened to be on the way out, unless they find a way
to turbo-charge their offers with social features, provide
mobile access, and add online video to their offers.”
–Karsten Weide, IDC Research VP, Media and Entertainment
A Curious Proposition
What are the benefits in offering “features, mobile and offers” versusadopting a business model that reflects a social oriented culture and its communication tools?
In its recent study, IDC‘s 2009/2010 U.S. Online Consumer Survey, the study’s “Abstract” raises a curious supposition:
What makes a Web 2.0 “brand” vs. a Web 2.0 “company?”
Are companies allowing consumer technologies and their attitudes toward using them to drive innovation from within? The evidence shows companies as slow to adopt to this change.
Weide’s call-to-action itself rings like a Web 1.0 analytical perspective: of “What works for business,” compared to, “How does the consumer want us to work?”
The latter offers a more Web 2.0 approach. It presumes a malleable business model that seeks to be directly informed of consumer wants and needs, interests and behavior to enable a real time business response using the tools of the day to maximize its business interest. Not just the application of web 2.0 “features” appended to an already outmoded business model.
Business 2.0 vs. marketing your business to look 2.0.
Is your company a Web 2.0 company or a Web 2.0 brand?
An unpublicized, prototype smart phone is meticulously detailed
in a blog post unbeknownst to its creators.
The whole Apple vs. Gizmodo blogger Jason Chen is unfortunately helping to define a soft spot in the information age: what activities establish and define a blogger as or from a journalist?
Are Bloggers Journalists?
From the headlines, it is clear that legal statutes and opinion are unclear and un-unified on the subject.
“…as Old Media continues to collapse, those very same institutions and individuals that once panned the digital world are now scrambling to embrace it…”
“If this case goes to court, as it appears to be doing, the appropriate legal definition of journalism should be expanded to include individuals that work for online news organizations and those that participate in legitimate journalistic activities on a regular basis, with blogger status becoming finally irrelevant.”
“Yet bloggers often act as journalists — journalists outside the mainstream media — and this ruling could muzzle ordinary citizens from using their voice to point out the foibles of companies without protection from lawsuits. At the same time, this ruling could also protect citizens and companies from having slanderous statements made about them on the Internet. It’s a ruling that cuts both ways.”
“At the heart of the case is the question of whether bloggers are journalists — and if so, should they be held to the same standards as well as receive the same protections.
Journalistics points out that the self-perception of bloggers as journalists has risen.
“PRWeek and PRNewswire recently teamed up on a study that found 52% of bloggers consider themselves journalists. The last time they did this study, roughly a third of bloggers felt this way. Why do more bloggers consider themselves journalists these days?”
“What makes a journalist a journalist is whether she is gathering news for dissemination to the public, not the method or medium she uses to publish. So the better way to frame the debate is: Can journalists blog?”
“As the California Supreme Court acknowledged, “The press’ function as a vital source of information is weakened whenever the ability of journalists to gather news is impaired. Compelling a reporter to disclose the identity of a source may significantly interfere with this news gathering ability; journalists frequently depend on informants to gather news, and confidentiality is often essential to establishing a relationship with an informant.” (Mitchell v. Superior Court)”
“Unlike traditional news outlets, however, many blogs have no editors, no publishers and, often, a staff of only one. And while some are supported by advertisers and contributions, many bloggers make no money at all.”
“Ultimately, the issue comes down to whether bloggers act like traditional journalists, says University of Iowa law professor and First Amendment specialist Randall Bezanson. Simply expressing opinions to a tiny audience doesn’t count, he says.”
The bill’s language extends protections to those “employed by the news media in any news gathering or news disseminating capacity,” or to anyone “enrolled as a student in an institution of postsecondary education and engaged in any news gathering or news disseminating capacity recognized by the institution as a scholastic activity or in conjunction with an activity sponsored funded, managed or supervised by school staff or faculty.”
The “news media” covered by the bill currently includes “newspapers, magazines, journals, press associations, news agencies, wire services, radio, television and any printed, photographic, mechanical, or electronic means of disseminating news and information to the public.”
“[S]ocial media and just-in-time applications have changed the way Americans get information about current events or health information”
- Aaron Smith, a Research Specialist at the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project and author of a report based on a new national phone survey.
“Yes, bloggers count as journalists. See the precedent of O’Grady v. Superior Court, a 2006 case in which bloggers were sued by Apple for revealing a confidential new product. The court ruled that bloggers do indeed qualify for protections offered all other journalists, both in California and federally.”
“He [Times reporter and subpoenaed author, James Risen] intends to honor his commitment of confidentiality to his source or sources,” Mr. Kurtzberg [Risen's lawyer] said. “We intend to fight this subpoena.”
In summary, due to the internet’s malleable nature that genuinely promotes creativity, remix, and innovation, we will need to rethink: copyright, authorship, identity, ethics, governance, privacy, commerce, love, family, ourselves.
Apple Gizmodo only seems to have expedited our need to truly grapple with this question now.
Are you a Blogger Journalist or Citizen Journalist?
Learn about Reporter’s Priviledge in your State here.
Learn about the protections journalist have in Shield Laws here.
Learn more about Retraction statutes here.
Related articles on journalism in the information age
Sometimes I think our society has come so far from darkness
to enlightenment no more Inquisition, for instance; no more
Scarlet A’s that we have come full circle and are now back
to being idiots. A case in point? This principal’s letter to parents
about why she doesn’t want kids to consider recess ”free time.” – fromPrincipal Declares Recess is NOT “Free Time”
Time for an Educator “time out.”
How do we prepare the brightest and most creative problem solvers of the next generation if we do not focus on their learning environment?
In a previous post I shared how one national non-profit organization was supporting structured recess and “play” at schools to improve the youth developmental environmental factors that contribute to a child’s learning success.
Unfortunately, here’s a story where a beleaguered administrator might need a time out to reflect upon what research shows works to best support a learning environment.
What’s your opinion?
Is recess and “free time” important in youth development?
What is the learning environment like at your neighborhood schools?
What is the role of recess and unstructured play time “recess” at schools near you?
Leave your comment.
It’s not even New Years Day and I’m all about change.
I’m talking about all those tools and occasions we use to remind ourselves that we are human and can always do better in our lives:
The New Year’s resolutions
New to-do lists
New business plan to execute
But What Creates Change?
Personally and professionally, I am collaborating with others to develop and share change strategies that inspire you to pursue a social path to create the desired changes you seek in your work, in your business, in your life.
I find that if we really want to achieve a systemic change in our business, in our lives or in the world, we need to lead as the agents of change.
Here are 8 questions
To help you develop your change strategies consider these:
What changes do I desire moving forward?
What are the negative patterns and influences I need to change or remove?
What motivates me to produce these changes?
What changes do I need to make so that I can achieve this?
What communities do I need to engage to create these changes?
Who have we shared these strategies with for feedback and reflection?
How can we creatively share and implement or strategies?
Where will we integrate these change strategies in our lives, relationships or business plan?
Are You a Change Agent?
Leadership as an agent of change is the strongest strategy to produce change in and around you. See two inspiring examples below of change agents leading the way.
So what are you doing to create change?
Share your comment here.
Recently, Guy Kawasaki showed how the 40-30-30 rule applies as well to business as it does to sports: 40% physical training, 30% technical skill and experience, and 30% willingness to take risks. The moral? If you haven’t had a good fall, you probably aren’t trying hard enough nor taking enough risks.
I find the upside to this rule in our potential to learn from our mistakes and the path that new learning can take. Falling down or failure can produce learning in the form of a new approach, an innovation upon a stagnant theme or a creative tact – all because we chose to push the envelope a little further and fell along the way.
Falling for Success
How have you or your business gained from a recent failure?
What are you doing to increase measurable risk taking away from routines?
In a previous post I cited President Barack Obama‘s appointment of Chief Technology Officer of the United States, Aneesh Chopra to “promote technological innovation to help achieve our most urgent priorities…”
Seems like the job has gone to Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google.
Eric Schmidt spoke at the G20 Summit in Pittsburgh for the Pittsburgh Technology Council. There he presented a futuristic view of the possibilities for the advancement in government, business, the economy and in individuals, all with an optimistic flair and a keen eye on the data drivers.
Schmidt’s presented images of cloud computing supported, real-time data exchanges that will inform our daily walks via our smart phones while also driving our domestic policy research initiatives: all based on relevance.
See choice excerpts from his talk below.
Watch his video presentation on technology, innovation, and the global economy.
Eric Schmidt, CEO Google “Pittsburgh Technology Council”
Here are some key excerpts:
Growth occurs because of private sector investment and innovation building new products and services that people care about. 2:26m
Real growth, sustainable growth comes from the investment of businesses and services that we all take advantage of. 2:42m
Pittsburgh is a great story. 3:30m
Eric Schmidt coins “Gutenberg’s Law”: History has demonstrated that there is a direct correlation in an amount of info available to the average citizen and economic growth and the progress of that citizen’s country. 4:35m
The more information that’s available the more that smart people can act on it. 4:56m
I’m one of those people who believes that there are smart people everywhere. 5:04m
And so in the global competitive model… is that you have an openness about information and that you use the information tools. 5:09m
The cycles of society have accelerated. The ups an downs- all because of the transparency and connectedness of all of us. 5:55m
We now respond to things in a global context that we would have never even known about event 10 and 20 years ago… 6:08m
On the correlation between information and economies:
World Bank Study: 10% of increase in high speed access, economic growth was 1.3% points…
So this stuff works. And it works because of globalization, globalization of information, globalization of markets. 6:50m
Japan leads in the speed of broadband. 7:21m
The avg Japanese city dweller has a 160Mb connection… Which is inconceivable to us here. 7:23m
The New US standard is capable of generating 50Mb per second connection. That manages to bring us to 13th in the world in terms of broadband penetration. 7:31m
The data that’s being generated is overwhelming. 487 exabytes of data information was created in 2008. That’s double of 2007. 7:58m
Today we are generating about a zettabyte of bytes. 8:15m
We estimated that the data generated by all of humanity from the inception of humanity to 2003 was about 5 exabytes. 8:25m
We have generated the entire world’s humanity of information… in the last 2 days. This is an explosion. And its an explosion with far reaching implication for all of us. 8:35m
There were 77 million smart phones sold last year. 9:13m
10 years from now… it will be possible to have all of music ever recorded on your ipod. 9:30m
The average teenager is now going to send 10,000 text messages a year. 10:00m
Historically you knew a hundred or 200 people in your tribe, and now feel like you’re a global citizen. 10:25m
All of these people are spending all of their time contributing stuff to each other. 12:08m
So the information you get is now more likely to be from your friend, or person to person, user to user. 12:13m
We’ve finally have now seen the breakdown of the traditional hierarchy of single individual to broadcast. 12:21m
The majority of information you that get everyday the way that you hear and the heuristics and the judgments that you make are from what your friends generate and from what your peers recommend, and that a permanent and important change in how our society works. 12:27m
“Remember what I read yesterday, remember what I know. Don’t tell me something I already know, tell me something I don’t know…” those technologies are already available today. 13:14
On cell phones:
You walk down a street it can tell you everything that happen on the street if you love the history of where you are. It can suggest where you will l go. It can predict where you will be 13:42m
So now you got the same ability to connect to things real time. 14:34m
All of a sudden this notion of real time tracking become useful for all of the things we take for granted. 15:29m
Because we can do real time data now, of the economy, of what people are doing, of what people are thinking, and what people are reading, we really can know the questions that we have to estimate from our friends – and we can do it scientifically. 16:11m
Had we done the same thing [network all the computers] we would have know that this horrendous [financial economic] crisis – we would have seen it coming. 17:03m
Had we been transparent and open we would have could have avoided the horrendous pains that the globe has gone through. 17:26m
Google Chief Economist, calls this time a Period of combinatorial innovation: its the system of innovation and its innovation all working together going as fast as they probably can. 17:51m
This is analogous to what happens standardizing the mechanical parts in the 19th century. We are doing the same thing with standardized of internet components. And that standardization has now made it all possible. 18:34m
When you want to see innovation, you will see it in these creative communities, little companies that have banded together. Small groups of people that have a mission and they try something and they try something. 18:59m
If you want to look for the face of innovation… look instead for this messy creative unstructured interesting, full of creative people kind of a model. Cause that’s will innovation really occurs. And that where the innovative people ultimately will go. 19:29m
So what happens is that this creates the opportunity to do businesses called micro multinationals: these are 10 people who see themselves serving a global audience. 19:56m
These are the business that are going to create the jobs that will get us where we need to go. 20:19m
What happens is as we lower the entry price, there are also ad models where a lot of money is going to these small company which allows them to get to the next stage and see how far they really can get. 20:22m
Cloud Computing: the opportunity we all have is to let people manages these data centers and you can do what you do best. 21:24m
What is interesting to this phenomena, is that size isn’t such a big barrier to entry as before. 21:49m
WSJ: There are more than 452,000 people say that blogging is their primary source of revenue. That’s even more than the number of lawyers we have in our country. 21:58m
This is a permanent shift in the economics of our world around us. 22:25m
Mobile phones everywhere, data everywhere: what does the world look like? Humans will do what humans know best, which is to be human. 23:11m
What will computers be good at? They’ll be at remembering everything, to recognize everyone, to know where everyone is, predict short term future, and continue to beat us in chess. 23:00m
What happens when all of this get put together, is that the world becomes more ambiguous, the world becomes more shades of gray. 23:59
The kinds of leaders and leaders we have are the ones who flourish in ambiguity. 24:30m
And because of this, it gets harder because of sophisticative techniques to know exactly what the”truth” is. 24:45m
But legitimate Truth groups, ones are actually have to get a message out, will have to battle with well funded targeted literally people trying to deceive because it will be in their economic interest to do. 25:03m
There will be possible to do clever forgeries…. All of us will have to learn how to deal with that and how to detect it , and hopefully how not to be influenced by them. 25:35
And in a world with of essentially perfect copies, people will be quite happy with a copy of an original because the digital copies will be so good. This has a lot of implication for how the content and media world work. 25:46m
In this new world there will be more bubbles. The bubbles will be higher, faster and up and down. Cause its true of all markets. We’ll all have to get used to that. 26:15m
The only answer… is about transparency. In this situation that I’m been talking about: open government, open activities, open standards, open networks- is really the only way.26:48m
Information hiding is ultimately a bad thing in these sort of open networks. 27:11m
Another thing that people should do is they should stop consuming energy and start consuming data. 27:40m
All of the issues we face with climate change can be addressed in many many ways by much smarter use of information to control and use our energy. 27:49m
And climate change is clearly between deadly nuclear power is really two of the great threats to the world moving forward. 28:00m
We are going to use computers and use information to be more careful with how we use the most precious resource we have all around us. 28:45
Everybody is going to be a critic in these new models. 28:35m
Another thing that we can do is take advantage of the fact that the network is more powerful then your computer. 29:50m And this is going to happen now with so many people having mobile phones in many powerful new ways. 30:00m
Let’s make sure that the principle that’s established in this dialogue is that extremist don’t win. 30:40m
Let’s make sure that we use the collective wisdom of us to understand of what good and whats valid and lets have both the decency and the proper approach to try get to the bottom to what the real truth is on any particular issue is. 30:51m
Growth is going to come from… the investment and the decisions that are being made in cities like here and by groups like this. 33:19m
One of the strategies is “optimism.” Literally when people feel better they invest and they get better. 33:41
Eric Schmidt quotes De Tocqueville (1831): America is unique because of its abundance of land, its absence of a king, and its democratic and egalitarian institutions and values. 34:15
From my perspective this story I’m telling reflects the possibility of newness, new places new people to be heard, new institutions that must earn and re-earn their relevance. That’s the challenges that we face: every govt, every CEO, every citizen. 34:40
I personally believe in the genius of the American People. 34:57m
When I look at my own story… what I see is creativity and the power of technology, and the genius of people working hard in small groups doing clever things. 35:03m
Where is the growth going to come from? And its going to come from exactly here and exactly in this right way, and I’m excited to be a part of that. 35:27m
Grand Vision? What technologies or societal advances (transparency, etc) do you think will be central to facilitating our economic recovery and future prosperity?
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Amos White is an Social Media Marketing Evangelist and public speaker.
Follow Amos on Twitter @Mos42
