The Big in Japan team was out in force at the World Series of Video Games at the Gaylord Texan. Our involvement with gaming really started this year with our work with the LEGO MMOG (massively multiplayer online game). It took us a while to figure out the how social communication and gaming could intersect, but very quickly it clicked. Since then we have really ‘amp’d-up’ our involvement in the gaming arena. If you are in the Dallas area we recommend stopping by the WSVG if you get a chance. Check out the photos from the Flickr Stream or see a few below:
Much to our suprise, we learned that Tantek Çelik is no longer with Technorati. We are excited to see what Tantek has up his sleeve, I suspect it is going to be cool! On a side note, the Wikipedia entry to Tantek was updated by Gary King minutes after this news became public. Isn’t Wikipedia great?
Fox, the creators of the hit series, The Simpsons have engaged their fan base into an organized community in a matter of weeks. They have engaged the community online using their Simpsons Social Network and enhanced that engagement by creating real world interconnection points (i.e. through the creation of the Kwik-E-Mart store concept).
Why? To promote the launch of the ‘The Simpsons Movie” opening 7/27/07. More than a million fans have visited the movie site and thousands have created Simpson-style versions of themselves (mine is to the upper-right). Check out the Flickr group of Simpsons Self-portaits here.
Now 7-Eleven stores (12 of them throughout the US and Canada) have been transformed into Kwik-E-Marts. The Dallas location is located at 6833 Northwest Highway. Check it out to the right.
The marketing concepts were the brainchild of Bobbi Merkel’s team from FreshWorks (Omnicom). FreshWorks calls the idea ‘reverse product placement’, taking fake goods from the screen and making them reality. Now you can go into Kwik-E-Mart and grab a Squishe, a Krusty’ or a Buzz Cola. Sadly you can’t get a Duff beer (the movie is rated PG-13).
Apple and AT&T just identified 500,000 alpha geeks for marketers around the world. What does that mean for your brand? Piper Jaffray is reporting that Apple sold more than 500,000 iPhones this weekend according to Tom Krazit of Crave. Here are the details:
- 95% of buyers in NYC and SFO bought the 8GB model (versus the 4GB)
- 50% of buyers were new customers for AT&T (Verizon’s CEO is kicking himself)
If you can engage the iPhone community it means you can have access to 500,000 early adopters. How? Start building tools specific to the needs of the ‘instant community’. How? Hire guys like us or come to the iPhoneDevCamp in San Francisco this week.
Wikipedia is the best known collector of social information. The site is more than six years old and as is known to most users as an online encyclopedia that anyone can edit. It is really more than an encyclopedia as an article in the New York Times titled, “All the News That’s Fit to Print Out” explains,
For centuries, an encyclopedia was synonymous with a fixed, archival idea about the retrievability of information from the past. But Wikipedia’s notion of the past has enlarged to include things that haven’t even stopped happening yet. Increasingly, it has become a go-to source not just for reference material but for real-time breaking news — to the point where, following the mass murder at Virginia Tech, one newspaper in Virginia praised Wikipedia as a crucial source of detailed information.
Wikipedia is a representation of information that evolves as our understanding of that information evolves. Interestingly, as Jonathan Dee points out, more than 6.8 million work together to create and edit more than 1.8 million articles. This ‘social information’ is increasingly becoming more and more timely. For the past six years users have been working on competing with existing encyclopedias like Britanica, but now Wikipedia has transcended that traditional model. The internet and the social interaction it allows have created something all together different, and fundamentally better.
Have you started ‘hacking’ on the iPhone yet? We are pushing on the development pretty hard in preparation for iPhoneDevCamp next week. The ajaxian folks have compiled several ‘notes and quirks’ with regard to development on the iPhone:
- Poking around the DOM, I don’t see any special objects, with the possible exception of window.offscreenBuffering (set to true).
- Bookmarklets work, although you have to go through the bookmarks menu to get to them.
- Safari crashes are handled gracefully – the main screen fades back in, and you can jump right back into Safari. It will then load page you were visiting when it crashed.
- Drag and drop, and other behaviors based on picking up mousemove events, don’t work. CSS-based element drag and drop doesn’t work either. Dragging one finger around the iPhone’s version of Safari causes the window to scroll, and that’s it. I assume that scroll events do work. I’m sure somebody is already working on a version of drag and drop based on window scrolling.
- For documents with no width set, the iPhone uses a default width of 980px.
- You do not get “mousedown” when you touch the screen. You get “mousedown” and “mouseup” at the same time when you release your finger. The “mousemove” event does not seem to fire at all. There is no way to handle double-clicking because that is the action for zooming, and calling event.preventDefault() doesn’t seem to override that.
Greg (in New York) and Robert (in Half Moon Bay) are eagerly awaiting the launch of the iPhone. Both are waiting in line at the Apple store a full day before release:
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The CEO of Whole Foods, John Mackey, is blogging about the FTCs recent challenge to the company’s acquisition of Wild Oats. Brad Feld reprinted an excellent example of how CEO’s can use blogs to get their side of the story directly to shareholders, consumers and legislators (I will reprint here):
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) recently filed a complaint challenging the merger of Whole Foods Market and Wild Oats. Whole Foods Market intends to fight this complaint in court. My blog posting provides a detailed look into Whole Foods Market’s decision-making process regarding the merger, as well as our company’s experience interacting with the FTC staff assigned to this merger. I provide explanations of how I think the FTC, to date, has neglected to do its homework appropriately, especially given the statements made regarding prices, quality, and service levels in its complaint. I also provide a glimpse into the bullying tactics used against Whole Foods Market by this taxpayer-funded agency. Finally, I provide answers in my FAQ section to many of the questions that various Team Members have fielded from both the media and company stakeholders.
As stated in our initial press release about Whole Foods Market’s challenge to the FTC’s complaint, we set an intention as a company to be as transparent as possible throughout this process. This is my first detailed effort at transparency. We will provide additional information as we field new questions and receive updates on the proceedings from the FTC and the courts.
That is the question on Chris Brogan‘s mind in a post he wrote earlier today. Chris suggests, “It’s one thing to have a community of friends and an audience for your blog, podcast, or videoblog. It’s another thing altogether to have an activated community of people who will take action and bring about actual change at your request.”
In his post titled Activated Communities, Chris asks his community for help fleshing out his idea. Ironically, the exercise to understand the concept of ‘activated communities’ will require that Chris’ community of social media people be ‘activated’.
How can you ‘activate’ your community? We have talked about the idea of understanding your ‘higher calling‘ for sometime. The idea is simple,
If you can determine what your company’s higher calling is you can direct your communication with your clients through this new channel. By working with consumers to answer this ‘higher calling’ the communication is no longer adversarial, but cooperative. Building a community around a higher calling can be very effective and fruitful for both the consumer and the company. You are no longer ‘company’ or ‘consumer’ but partners working toward a positive goal you both care about.
It is hard to simply ask your community to ‘Digg’ something for you if they don’t ‘digg’ it. One surefire way to ‘activate’ your community is to build that community around a higher calling from the very start. My question is, “can you activate any community around any idea?” My theory is that most communities will activate around the underlying interest or ‘higher calling’ of the group (i.e. photography for Flickr), but activation will quickly dissipate as the ‘call for action’ becomes less and less topical. Obviously your friends will ‘Digg’ almost anything for you, but will soon tire of the activity if the requests continue outside of the communities ‘higher calling’. Chris compiled this neat list of ‘tools’ for activated communities:
- A Digg account. – Use this for promoting stories and blog posts and podcasts that want higher attention.
- A LinkedIN account. – Build your own network, link it to mine, and then we both expand our awareness and our reach. Because if I’m seeking out someone in your network, I can now ask you to help me connect to them. This builds connectivity to people you might need to reach very quickly.
- A Twitter account. – To get the word out quickly. Re-twittering helps tons.
- A Facebook account. – I think groups on Facebook are a quick way to get mail out to people easily. It’s also a good opt-in / opt-out mechanism.
- A Flickr account. – What if some of our activation requires visuals? I guess you could add a YouTube account for the same purpose, just in case we want to shoot video.
- A PayPal account. Sometimes it’s just about a donation to a cause. When a friend says their servers are down because of bandwidth bills, it’s nice to be able to drop a few bucks in the till to help them over a hump. (Sometimes it *is* just about money).
