In these days of technology marketing, many marketers dream of going “viral.” Ahhh yes. Your video, so loved that it is sent by one person to 10, and by those 10 to 10 more … becoming a virtual phenomenon.

I recently read a blog post from Ad Age about Diesel’s latest viral campaign. No, I wasn’t a recipient of the viral campaign. Apparently I’m not young and hip enough to wear Diesel clothing. Marketing such trendy fashion to me could in fact tarnish their otherwise “cool” brand.

Anyway. This campaign is crazy (check out the ransom video). Essentially, what they did was stage a kidnapping that played out in video on their website. Two young and beautiful women (the “Two Heidies” as they were called) steal a Diesel underwear collection, kidnap the sales manager and lock themselves in a hotel room saying that they want to be “famous supermodels.”

In their demands they say that they want to be put in Diesel’s next advertising campaign and want the name ‘Diesel’ changed to ‘Heidies’ … because it’s “much younger, cooler, fresher…” They give until Friday or they will destroy the stolen underwear collection.

For the next five days, visitors to the site were encouraged to participate. One such way to get in on the action was to submit your name, which would be spelled out and placed between “the Heidies”. Users were also permitted to request things of the Heidies, such as “Have a pillow fight.” Imagine that.

The production was indeed elaborate, but it paid off for Diesel. This has to be the most innovative viral marketing campaigns that I have heard of.

Yesterday was either a watershed day in user generated content or at least an important footnote. The popular user-ranked news website Digg received a “takedown” notice after an article on how to crack the HD-DVD encryption specification was displayed on their website. After receiving the notice the company’s CEO decided to remove the article and suspend the user accounts of those who attempted to repost the article. He explained his motivation to do so as being for the rule of law and not as a direct attack against the Digg user community.

The community disagreed and proceeded to en mass post numerous articles with the encryption specification which by that point had already appeared at numerous locations across the web. The result was that the users had essentially hijacked the website from having any other news appear. When faced with either deleting a significant number of its users from the system or allowing the posting of the content in violation of the “takedown” notice the founder of Digg, Kevin Rose, decided to cast his vote with his users. To the possible detriment of Digg, he has decided to fight any legal action that occurs even if it means the end of the company.

So was the action of yesterday one of democracy on the web or one of mob rule? I am not a fan of overly restrictive copyright rules, and the information was freely available on the internet at numerous locations other than Digg, but Kevin Rose had no choice. Once you cast your company as a community that is primarily run by your users you have to accept that you live by the sword and die by the sword. Perhaps the users of Digg understand that, and are willing to see Digg die what they see as a noble death fighting for what they think is right. But Digg itself had no choice in the end, in the face of a swift and powerful user run protest it could either fight for its users or cancel all their accounts.

The possible repercussions of this on unmoderated user forums, discussion boards and other community based sites may start to be felt in the coming weeks. Or maybe the Digg user community is particularly strident. But its something to note, and could go down as a seminal event in user generated content on the web and who is responsible for the ensuing content.

I have come across two great examples recently where doing good is good business. I sense this is more than just a coincidence and is really a trend that should be monitored if not co-opted by other firms. The two things I came across are uniquely well conceived online marketing plans/ideas. So before I riff on the broader implications of the do-good trend let’s take a look at each example.

The first is from Microsoft and launched last month. It’s a new marketing plan involving their Live Messenger product. You may recall it by its previous name MSN Messenger. It is a popular and mature product that is free to use and ad supported. Many of you might not have noticed the rotating banner ads at the bottom of Live Messenger, they are easy to miss, but between pay per placement and pay per click they generate a modest profit. In a brilliant marketing move Microsoft has put a spin on the term “IM” and has created the “I’M Making a Difference” campaign. The essence of the campaign is that by choosing from one of the several worthy charities such as the Boys and Girls Club, Multiple Sclerosis Society, Sierra Club, etc and inserting a corresponding symbol at the end of your display name, Microsoft creates an ad revenue share with that charity.

So at no cost to you some of the revenue Microsoft receives for showing the ads that you are ignoring is sent to the charity you have chosen. An “i’m” symbol shows up at the end of your display name that shows that you are participating in the program. It is a brilliantly simple and well executed idea and should serve to increase users brand affinity for Live Messenger, which is a perfect complement to Microsoft chairman Bill Gates’s epic charitable efforts. The halo effect for the advertisers should not be ignored, perhaps leading down the road to higher placement fees which leads to more net dollars for everyone involved. An excellent, and rare, example of making something you are already doing help others. I encourage others who use Live Messenger (over 250 million have a version of it installed) to give it a try.

I came across the other “do good” idea a few weeks ago. The company is Green Dimes, and it has been up and running for the past six months. The company has built an internet based business model around junk mail. No, not the Viagra ads you receive in Outlook, but the junk mail you receive in your mailbox at home. They state that each year the equivalent of 100 million trees are used to create the junk mail we come home to every day and promptly throw in the trash. They act as a well connected intermediary to several “Do Not Mail” lists and let you customize which junk mail you actually want to receive. In a nice marketing twist they plant a number of trees on your behalf. Even their 1 year plan plants 12 trees. They keep a running tracker on their home page of how many trees they have saved/planted and how many pounds of junk mail they have stopped from being delivered. It’s a well conceived business that is venture backed and, to use the classic marketing phrase, “makes a great gift”. Several catalog dependent companies such as Mrs. Fields cookies have noticed a growing number of opt out requests coming from Green Dimes asking for recipients to be taken off of the company’s bulk mailing list. A note to catalog marketers to think about perhaps integrating their email and snail mail preference centers into one area.

So, do two examples of businesses doing good business by doing good make a trend? Actually, there are many more examples, some of which you may know of and I have yet to come across. So, please comment away on this post if you know more good examples.

The broader trend I see is that, increasingly, customers want to see, or will want to see, everyday companies doing their part to be good citizens. Particularly for the younger generation of consumers, this may become a requirement to prove your brand’s credibility. Old line businesses such as with British Petroleum’s “Beyond Petroleum” campaign and Charlotte-based NUCOR Steel’s “It’s our nature” website stories have been well done. However, those two firms have much to prove as far as whether their intentions lead to credible actions. So keep an eye out on your competitors, they may be more green or charitable than you. Whether they are or not, it may well be time for you to take the initiative to position your brand as a leader in this area. And you might enjoy the monetary benefits while you help everyone else enjoy the more tangible benefits of your efforts.

I recently attended the 8^th Annual Information Architecture Summit where talk of Web 2.0 was all the rage. The theme of the conference was ‘Enriching IA’ with a focus on:

• Rich information: More and more information becomes available to users and systems alike, and these days most of the information comes with metadata, built-in links to other information, and API’s or micro-formats that allow for mashups. How rich is your information?
• Rich interaction: The web is moving towards a more interactive environment, and desktop apps are adapting web metaphors. How does this affect the way you design applications?
• Rich relationships: We’re all already linked through information; and social computing is increasing the possibilities to exchange information. Is your information a social lubricant or is it an obstacle for building relationships?

Web 2.0 obviously dips into all of these areas. As tagging and open APIs allow users to define metadata and create visualizations and overlays of information with things like Google Maps, Mashups and Many Eyes, the web is becoming a users’ market. Users also are sharing and communicating and networking at breakneck speed. Sites like MySpace, YouTube, and Flickr – to name a few – allow users to share and tag their own ‘information’ and to create their own content that they can then put out for all the world to see. So if users are controlling their own content, does that mean Information Architects (IAs) will go away?

Hardly. Web 2.0 may be the next new best thing, but it ain’t the whole ball of wax. There are some User Experience gurus, however, that feel that IA is going away. Josh Porter claims that:

“IA as it has lived will soon die. Not because it wasn’t valuable, not because IAs didn’t do great work, but because the Web is moving on. The problem is that IA models information, not relationships. Many of the artifacts that IAs create: site maps, navigation systems, taxonomies, are information models built on the assumption that a single way to organize things can suit all users… one IA to rule them all, so to speak.”

I need to point out two things here:

1. He says “IA as it has lived” and…
2. “IA models information not relationships”.

One can interpret the first statement to mean that IAs must adapt or die. I’ll agree with that. What career doesn’t follow that process? The second assumes that everything on the web is ABOUT relationships. It is with this statement that I have the most trouble. I’m not convinced that everything on the web is appropriate for Web 2.0 ‘methods’. Does all information need to ‘build relationships’? Does he mean relationships of data or metadata or social relationships? I can’t help but think that the alternative to ‘one IA to rule them all’ is ‘all IAs to confuse them all’. In other words, personal content, metadata, taxonomies etc., means the most to the people who create it. If everyone created their own street signs, where would we be?

Needless to say, I’m skeptical. For one, IA is more than JUST deliverables like site maps, navigation schemes and taxonomies. It is about solving information problems, creating good experiences (on and off the web) and helping people find information (which still applies in a Web 2.0 world). Peter Morville points out a study in which Amazon tried a tagging experiment. What they found was that:

“tagging works well when people tag “their” stuff, but it fails when they’re asked to do it to ‘someone else’s’ stuff. You can’t get your customers to organize your products, unless you give them a very good incentive. We all make our beds, but nobody volunteers to fluff pillows at the local Sheraton.”

As for me, I’m not jumping on the Web 2.0 bandwagon just yet. At least not to the degree that everything must be 2.0. Sure, it’s cool, it has its uses and it has great potential, but I do believe that there is content out there to be organized for the sake of the users who don’t want to fluff someone else’s pillows.

Running an interactive agency in Atlanta for the past 8 years has made me painfully aware of the contrast between the tremendous amount of industry talent we have here and the perception of that talent outside (and sometimes inside) of Atlanta. So I’m always looking to find ways to make it more obvious that Atlanta is a leader in the interactive community. It’s why I’m on the board of the Atlanta Interactive Marketing Association (AiMA). It’s also why I like to point out events that are in town that showcase some of the talent we have in the city. So here are a few events coming up that you might be interested in checking out:

April 10th - Collective intelligence, collaboration and user-generated content

April 11th - Social Media, The New Face and Voice of PR

April 17th - 18th - Customer Relationship Management Association’s First Annual Summit

April 25th - AiMA’s User Experience Event (details coming).

Hope to see you there! And thanks to Sherry Heyl for pointing some of these out to me.

Our very own Wade Forst moderated this month’s Atlanta Interactive Marketing Association (AiMA) last night, titled Branding 2.0: The New Online Community. The event had an amazing turnout of around 200 people.

Wade was able to pull two speakers from heavy-hitting consumer brands; Tom Daly with Coca-Cola’s Global Interactive Marketing and Michael Friedman, who is in charge of Strategy and Planning for Darden Restaurant’s interactive marketing.

The topic of Web 2.0 is a popular one. Last night’s event touched on some very interesting ways consumers are interacting with brands online.  For those of you not able to attend the event, here are some of the key take-aways:

• Consumers will be part of the brand with or without you. It’s your job to leverage and enable the consumer’s interaction - without it feeling unauthentic (i.e. Dove’s video advertisement on YouTube).
• Support what customers are doing and do not dictate their actions. To work you have to let them interact freely with your brand.
• Seeding can be risky because people can be vocal about authenticity.
• You can’t buy viral.  Something will either catch on or it won’t. Forcing it won’t appear natural and consumers will be turned off.
• Fish where the fish are - don’t try to get them to swim in your pool first.
• It’s not just about sending people to your website any more.  Interaction with your brand happens within multiple, fragmented mediums.
• Companies have less and less control over brand today. You must relinquish full control and seek to guide and influence it.
• There are different kinds of KPIs for user generated content. It’s not all about driving traffic; there is a reinvigoration of the importance of brand lift online. 

So we were brainstorming for a new client the other day, and some of the ideas that came up revolved around asking for user feedback.  One idea was allowing users to vote on new features and another was an ongoing customer feedback poll for regularly changing topics.  Not a boring, generic poll, but something that really made users feel like they were contributing to the growth and success of the company by providing their input.  

We feel these types of ideas are powerful because they tap into the concept of having buy-in.  When you contribute to the success of something, you take pride and are more motivated and loyal.  You now have a vested interest.

This is the same concept as gaining employee buy-in to company goals by having them contribute their own thoughts and opinions.  If an employee feels like they are “part” of the company instead of just doing a job, they are more likely to stay and work hard.

So this got me thinking…why is the concept of “buy-in” or “vested interest” so powerful?  What are the psychological principles driving this phenomena?  I took one of my team members (and avid Spunlogic blogger), Melissa Read, to lunch to explore this more.  I knew Melissa would be good to talk to because we are working on some really cool initiatives right now that involve utilizing time-tested psychological concepts and applying them online.  We brainstormed a little bit and this is what we initially came up with (at least enough for a blog post to start the discussion):

Individualism – There is a strong human need, especially with Americans, to stand out in a crowd and be seen as an individual.  By giving an opportunity to be heard and voice their opinion, you are giving them an outlet to express their unique and personal perspective.  And by providing this outlet to express their individualism, they now have a positive association and a deeper connection with you.

Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs: Self-Esteem – By providing input, the company makes them feel like their opinion matters and that they are worth something to you.  This makes them feel good and boosts their self-esteem.  This also creates a positive emotional association with your website and your company.

Classical Conditioning – Now that they have a positive association with your company, when they have future interactions with the company they are going to still have this positive association (even if they don’t know why).  The more positive interactions you have, the more this strengthens this association.

Internal Locus of Control – By providing input, they have a perception of being in control and they feel like they are shaping the future of their own experiences.  This “new and improved” experience is coming in the future and they want to stick around to have it.  If you deliver on their wishes, you will further solidify this relationship and create a solid bond.

These types of psychological principles are at the core of user behavior and we are just scratching the surface of their applications online. 

Ten years ago, I discovered a new food at an Icelandic breakfast table, Vla — a kind of yogurt you can drink. Packaged in a boxed milk container, Vla was a smooth yogurt that came in several flavors. I loved Vla. It was so unique. I had never tasted anything like it before. Invented by the Dutch, the Icelandic people had been drinking Vla for years… it just hadn’t quite reached the US markets. Several years after tasting Vla, I stumbled upon a similar product in an Israeli convenience store. It was designed to give you a cool boost in the desert heat. Unlike Vla, this product was packaged in individual plastic containers — perfect for any desert traveler on the go. Years after that, I found a similar product called Dannon Light and Fit in an American grocery store. Packaged in a small bottle, shaped like an hourglass, Light and Fit was a smooth yogurt drink designed for athletic people who wanted a fast and healthy snack.

Sometimes the greatest new things aren’t new at all — they’re just reincarnations of old things in new places. I think of that often as I watch our fascination with User Generated Content grow. People love to talk about User Generated Content like it’s a new thing in media — a phenomenon that shocked our industry, becoming an overnight success. But here lately, I’m starting to wonder whether it’s really new at all.

Consider reality TV shows like American Idol. On Idol, everyday people get to compete for fame. Everyday people create most of the shows’ content. And even if they aren’t brave enough to get in front of the cameras, everyday people decide on what they see by casting votes. There’s a TON of participation on Idol — more votes were cast for that show last year than any presidential election.  And there are so many other shows like it. Survivor, The Real World and even Jerry Springer are no exception. In each, most of the content is generated by the user. Radio talk shows like Howard Stern work the same way. People love to call in and give their perspectives. And that’s the show — real people giving real perspectives. One time, I was listening to an Atlanta radio station where some guy in his mid 20’s was planning a special date… with his step sister. They’d been separated before college but were recently reunited. The guy thought it might be wrong to date his stepsister… but in his words, “She’s smokin’ hot!” You can’t imagine how many people called in with their two cents on that. That show was so funny I missed my exit on the way to work.

User Generated Content is a new phenomenon for the Internet, but is it really new to media? Or is it just a reincarnation of a very old concept – one that has been successful in so many other media forms? Some would say that Reality TV and radio talk show participants have less control over content when compared to Internet contributors. After all, producers can modify tapes and recordings to give shows their own spin. But ultimately, don’t web administrators sensor online contributions in basically the same way?

Every time a new and successful idea is introduced online, I ask myself whether it’s new at all. It’s usually not. A single good concept can be reborn in so many new places — becoming an overnight success time and time again. I’m not a fortune teller, but I believe I’ve got the power predict the next big thing in any new media form. The past and the present are my crystal ball. 

This past weekend’s SoCon07 event was a big success, with 100 people attending the Friday night dinner session and well over 200 people attending Saturday’s conference -held at Kennesaw State University. The Friday night dinner session consisted of table discussions moderated by some of Atlanta’s leading internet thought leaders, such as Jeff Haynie, Sanjay Parekh, Leonard Witt, and others. I had the pleasure of joining them as a table moderator for the discussion on “Building Online Communities”. It was a spirited discussion, not just on popular online communities such as MySpace and Facebook, but also what can be done in a closed environment such as within churches and businesses. There was an interesting social networking application that was created right here in Atlanta called Yaplet, that has some very interesting use cases in online shopping as well as general information sites. It creates a new niche in contextual chat that I think has some legs. Many thanks to Christina and Matthew Might for bringing their thoughts to bear on the discussion, as well as all the other attendees for taking the time to share their expertise and interests.

The Saturday event was kicked off by Leonard Witt and Sherry Heyl, and was then headlined by Chris Klaus whose past efforts in internet security helped put Atlanta technology companies on the map. Chris is now heading Kaneva which is doing some innovative work in creating a platform for virtual worlds. Like the “unconference” it was dubbed, discussions ranged from the esoteric to the mainstream. The main takeway for me from the event was that Atlanta’s internet economy is broad in terms of interests, and deep in talent. Many thanks to the people both in front of and behind the scenes who helped make this weekend a success.

Yahoo has continued its recent trend towards remaining relevant today and launched a BETA of a game changing service called Yahoo Pipes and the response from the early adopters has been so good that they had to shut down the service for the better part of the day to increase capacity. I will explain my take on the service shortly but first a quick overview of what the service aims to be as it evolves towards its 1.0 release.

Much of the web today is a hodge-podge of data mixed in with the visual representation of that data. Web pages look good and present value to users but do not interact easily with other web pages or services. There has been a movement towards making web content more structured and the ultimate goal for some visionaries like Tim Berners-Lee is the idea of the sematic web in which different types of content and services on the web can interact intelligently, and with a minimal amount of human intervention.

Standards such as RSS have helped free up some types of content into a structured and streamable format. This, combined with web services such as FLICKR, Google Maps and others offering SOAP and REST API formats have helped lead to the rash of mashups web users have been beneficiaries of over the past couple of years. While mashups have been relatively easy to create from a programmers perspective, they have not been easy to create as an internet savvy but non-technical end user. Yahoo Pipes aims to change that. Though it is named after UNIX pipelines, from where the Yahoo service gets its inspiration, the approachability of the service, with its visual assembly environment aims for a different crowd than the obscure and often obtuse command line interfaces of such UNIX stalwarts as vi and shell scripting. Pipes allows its users to visually connect the input and output nodes of different pre-built modules together to create mashups with significantly less effort than is currently required. Not that mashups are difficult to create, but now they have gone from requiring a little bit of a programmer’s time to requiring only the end users efforts. The output of the Pipes mashup is pushed out in RSS, RDF, JSON, or ATOM format so that it can then be reused again by someone or something else. Toss in a user content sharing on Pipes and suddenly every user can feel like a king.

My take on Yahoo Pipes after briefly being able to use the service is that it is a harbinger of the next stage of the democratization of data. By empowering users to mix RSS feeds, repurpose content, and define their own complex flows of data and services it helps bring power to the true users of the data. The marketing data, sales data, and financial data of an organization are controlled not by their respective departments but primarily by the technology department. This model will remain true for some time, but as elegant and powerful services such as Yahoo Pipes come into their own, and as the web continues to expose data feeds via standardized formats the end users will be able to expose, repurpose, blend, and consume the data in original and meaningful ways by themselves.

Great programmers will always be needed, and I believe they are the true artistic masters of our time. As great programmers create not just great applications and services, but great tools to allow the true end users to repurpose those applications and services we will all be better off. Web savvy end users want to stand on the shoulder of giants not wait in line for their IT department to respond to their requests. Just as programmers today sling code more efficiently using Rails instead of slogging through Assembler, non programmers are now being exposed to elegent and evolving services such as Yahoo Pipes to enable their own ideas and meet their own needs.

To be fair IBM announced an early stage approach towards end user created flows today in the form of QEDWiki - work on the name guys, but otherwise a great service as well. Marc Andreesen has built a platform over at Ning to allow for the easy creation of social networking sites. Yahoo Pipes is more generalized and likely to catch on versus those platforms. Tim O’Reilly calls Yahoo Pipes a milestone in the history of the internet. In my view its one of the biggest steps towards the democritization of data, de Tocquiville would blog relentlessly about this if he were alive today.