That's One Big Internet Right There

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My Top Ten Favorite Fetishes
Arachibutyrophilia - Excessive interest in peanut butter.
"I discovered this when the couple that livedbeneath me got into a bit of trouble. They'd invited another couple to join them, and the other female had a severe — and undiagnosed — allergy to peanut butter. Moments after they'd smeared her with the chunky goo, her breathing stepped up toward hyperventilation, and even when scrubbed down with wet towels, her skin took on the bloated, bubbled texture of a salted cane toad. (And I feel professionally obliged to report that while concerned, her partner nonetheless showed unmistakable signs of arousal.) Within fifteen minutes, she resembled a giant tongue, and would never be able to tolerate even the whiff of peanut butter again."

If I had a dollar... (via)

Top Ten Ironic Ads from History
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hU5N2SrEaZI&w=425&h=344]

The Uniform Project
As an exercise in sustainable fashion, one foxy lady wears one dress every day for an entire year. Of course, as rules sometimes do, it unleashed creativity rather than stamping it out. (via)

Radical Idea Creation from BrainStore
"Imagine a CEO, CFO and a junior sales manager of our coffee company cutting magazines together with a 40 year old mom, some students, an office guy, a travel manager and an Italian cook with some loud MTV music on background. After three minutes they will run trough the yard competing who writes ideas faster. After seven minutes they will draw pictures using gouache. After this stage, about 1000 “raw ideas” are expected to be produced."

Hastily Made Cleveland Tourism Video
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ysmLA5TqbIY&w=425&h=344]

Developing Your Own Planning Style

Developing your own planning stylehttp://static.slidesharecdn.com/swf/ssplayer2.swf?doc=ipawithoutvideo-090703033154-phpapp01&stripped_title=developing-your-own-planning-style
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The Future of the Media Agency
"Making predictions for what's going to happen in media next week is hard, let alone undergo the ambitious challenge of trying to second guess the next five years. However, we believe our vision, which is based on rigorous research, conversations with key influencers and the collation of pertinent data and statistics, is not far-fetched. In fact, most of the predictions we make are grounded in today's reality; we are building the foundations now for a future-proof media agency in five years. So, take a trip into the future with us, use your imagination and tell us what you think."

From Wikipedia: The Hermeneutic Cycle
Heidegger (1927) developed the concept of the Hermeneutic Circle to envision a whole in terms of a reality that was situated in the detailed experience of everyday existence by an individual (the parts). So understanding was developed on the basis of "fore-structures" of understanding, that allow external phenomena to be interpreted or in a preliminary way. Gadamer (1975) developed this concept, leading to what is recognized as a break with previous hermeneutic traditions. But while Heidegger saw the hermeneutic process as cycles of self-reference that situated our understanding in a priori prejudices, Gadamer reconceptualized the hermeneutic circle as an iterative process through which a new understanding of a whole reality is developed by means of exploring the detail of existence. Gadamer viewed understanding as linguistically-mediated, through conversations with others in which reality is explored and an agreement is reached that represents a new understanding.[2] The centrality of conversation to the hermeneutic circle is developed by Donald Schön (1983), who characterizes design as a hermeneutic circle that is developed by means of "a conversation with the situation."

The Marriage of Advertising and Social Media

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Social-branding-chart At some point we pit advertising and social media against each other when we should have been marrying those core advertising messages with meaningful social development all along. They’re forbidden lovers, those two.

For most brands, there are limitations to what can be accomplished with no advertising at all. Google advertises. Zappos is hiring an ad agency. We know when we advertise sales go up, and when we stop, it’s much more difficult to reach expectations.

This is why we need to get better at wedding these two worlds. Developing and evolving brands to help them become more conversational, meaningful and culturally able to cope with this new landscape, but still using that core of interestingness to focus a brand’s appeal.

The idea of Social Branding starts by slowly transforming away from a world where reach and frequency are king, but still takes the best pieces of what’s worked before.

Particularly for brands with deeply ingrained bureaucracies, we need to slowly and tediously replace the levels of process, the fear of the off-message, the red tape, with transparency, open communication and the encouragement of experimentation.

But those changes can be juiced from the other side as well. Those pretty advertising messages are often a company’s most recognizable outward expression of who they are. As such they certainly can go a long way in helping change how a company sees itself internally, too. Not dissimilar-ly to how you might feel in a new pair of jeans. Certainly not enough to be truly different, but probably enough to make you feel good about those 5 pounds you lost and give you the confidence to lose 5 more.

So this is where we are. We need to find the center of what makes companies interesting and different. We need to help companies build cultures based on sharing and transparency. We can help corporations feel much smaller by understanding how to peel back the layers and reveal the soul. It’s the humanizing elements that allow us to get to building the outward expressions that make the change feel more real to those both on the inside and outside.

It’s that soul that can help us find the motivating message, that focused positioning that moves people to get beyond just liking us and get to liking to buy from us. And from there, we can build the platforms for conversation, insert the people and new processes that make our communication more cumulative and extendable. And only then will our outreach work that way it truly can.

Brooks on Psychology

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Headheart David Brooks had a pretty cool article discussing the drawbacks of evolutionary psychology in Friday's NY Times. In it he says:

"But individuals aren’t formed before they enter society. Individualsare created by social interaction. Our identities are formed by the particular rhythms of maternal attunement, by the shared webs of ideas, symbols and actions that vibrate through us second by second. Shopping isn’t merely a way to broadcast permanent, inborn traits. For some people, it’s also an activity of trying things on in the never-ending process of creating and discovering who they are.'

My initial reaction to that paragraph was praise for the fantastic insight. Although, within a few minutes, the beauty of the language had worn off a bit and I was left with the sort of - well, no shit - feeling.

All these arguments tend to group themselves into neat little categories. Nature vs. nurture, good vs. bad, rational vs. emotional, when most of our world is far too complex and illogical to paint with such broad strokes. I mean really, it's in our nature to believe we are more of a product of nurture. It's our emotions that cause us to ascribe rationality to subconscious thought processes. It can be the bad in us that causes us to judge others for things we deem bad. We're all shades of gray swimming through overwhelming inputs seeking efficiency of story, often at the sacrifice of objective reality.

No real point here, but just got me thinking that a little balance, a little moderation of thought and humility could probably do us all some good.

Now time for you to say, "Well, no shit."

Meet the Yim Gnome. He Wants to Eat You.

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Perhaps our relationship ended too quickly. We didn't give each other the proper time and care that allow relationships to survive and thrive. What can I say? Work got in the way. There were fights. He kept trying to eat me.

Plus he still had the stench of Kaitlyn on his breathe, which was difficult to take.

Anyway, with regards to Whrrl and Lauren over at Swarm Collective, I give you my evening with Yim Gnome.

http://whrrl.com/whrrlMini/experience/18060574?s=small&sharer=18060520

The Shirky Doctrine

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http://video.ted.com/assets/player/swf/EmbedPlayer.swf

Clay Shirky at TED: How Twitter Can Make History

"In a world where media is global, social, ubiquitous and cheap, in a world where the former audience are now increasingly full participants, in that world media is less and less often about crafting a single message to be consumed by individuals. It’s more and more often a way of creating an environment for convening and supporting groups."

Top Non-Entertainment Brands on Facebook

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Socialmediaexpert1 Social brands clearly don't become so because of their social media strategy. They are so because of who they are. It's the fundamental misunderstanding that make those that call themselves "social media experts" questionable at best. The moment you label yourself by that name, you've removed yourself from the parts of the conversation that actually make brands work in the space. Instead they become tasked with building facebook pages, resizing twitter backgrounds until they fit, randomly following anyone who unfortunately utters a phrase remotely related to the products they sell.

And so I'm not misunderstood, much of that is still important. Understanding the nomenclature, the ability to differentiate and remain interesting in social spaces is critical. But doing so in a vacuum is merely a series of band-aids, not dissimilar to a brands sales spike during peaks in an advertising cycle. GM may know a thing or two about that.

But 20 of the top 200 fan pages on facebook are brand-related, minus entertainment, and that may sound pretty good. 10% would actually be more than I expected, frankly.

But a closer look would reveal a slew of unofficial pages fed by their fans, random memes, stuff like that. 11 of them are official, the largest of which was a true fan page that was taken over by the brand (in a good way). And of the top 20, only 16 companies are actually represented. Anyway, interesting to see how basic the vast majority of these fan pages actually are. Most didn't need to be tricked up too much, people wanted to share them already.

Point being - solving the social media problem means solving the social problem, which doesn't have much to do with social media.

8.      Coca-Cola      3,462,807 (unofficial, then given to or purchased by brand)
10.      Nut ella      3,205,591 (unofficial)
18.      Pringles      2,774,256 (official, doing some videos, etc.)
40.      Starbucks Coffee Company      2,307,465 (official, good feed)
55.      adidas Originals      1,944,196 (official)
61.      McDonald's      1,870,132 (unofficial)
100.      Toblerone      1,496,941 (unofficial)
105.      Nike Shoes      1,463,321 (unofficial)
109.      Converse All Star      1,450,969 (unofficial)
112.      CONVERSE      1,418,670 (unofficial)
120.      REESE'S      1,380,962 (official, doing some interesting stuff with college program)
132.      OREO cookies      1,334,269 (official)
139.      Starbucks Frappuccino      1,297,731 (official)
158.      PUMA      1,212,972 (official)
172.      ipods      1,175,028 (unofficial)
178.      oreos      1,166,410 (unofficial)
187.      H&M      1,133,591 (official, applications)
188.      MTV      1,133,246 (official)
189.     MTV     1,129,701 (unofficial)
194.      Red Bull      1,103,357 (official, good feed, applications)

Ranking via PageData Photo via Nicky Deez

Phoenix Phandom

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First there was the Phoenix Lisztomania official video.

Then there was the much cooler piece of fandulation with the brat pack mashup.

And finally, similar to a movie remake, here's today's take on the brat pack mashup (called the brooklyn brat pack mashup). Very cool stuff.

It's interesting how these kinds of mashups tend to make for good introductions. For that video, a good amount of views probably just came from Phoenix fans looking to hear more of the music, but all the positive associations with the brat pack allowed new listeners to then shift their interest to the music, as well. Similar to how Roni used this video to transfer interest from a bunch of ad geeks like me.

I would assume the bulk of this mashup stuff isn't necesarily about transferance, but it certainly does seem to have particular implications for brands trying to create higher involvement from a low involvement category.