More Digital blog

I was forwarded this link today on Sarkozy considering charging an extra tax to companies like Google for taking business away from established advertising/marketing companies (publishers, record labels…). This is a BEAST of a topic, so we’ll see how I do at tackling it, even if it’s just a little piece of it.

First, a little background. I’ve lived in France, on and off, for just over a year. I recently received a three year visa to live there permanently (well, three years permanently anyway) and I can say most of my discourse over the last year has been surrounding the process of getting established in France and the incredible amount of paperwork involved and hoops to jump through. As of today, the bank account I applied for in August is still not completely open and I have yet to receive my bank card (after no less than 10 visits to the bank). While this may seem unrelated to the topic at hand, there is a little relevance that will hopefully become obvious along the way. In addition to having that experience, I dj. Completely digital, I buy all of my music online. I would say I spend an average of ten to fifteen hours a week looking for music. I use blogs, Itunes, dj pools, online memberships, and any other number of sites to buy my music.

Finally, I like talking about Google. The man, the myth, the legend. The beast.

In this particular case, I find myself defending Google. Whoah. What? Yep. The Google I know and love came from a good place once. Record companies, labels and distributors are useless to me. While I will still seek out vinyl on occasion, in a store, it’s always old music.

The idea that the past should be protected at the cost of the future is ingrained in the French culture and is what makes Paris a beautiful city to this day…I think. However, a resistance of the absolute and obvious – that record companies, distributors and labels are going extinct – is both ignorant and only slows, not halts the inevitable. But the French do love to resist the inevitable. A small example: It was only about two years ago that train station ticket vending machines started taking bank cards/ credit cards. And most still won’t accept bank cards that have been issued outside the EU, which infuriates me and I’ll move on before I’ve hi-jacked my own post with absurdities about living in Paris. In New York, however (just for example), train station vending machines have been taking bank cards/credit cards since about 1999.

All of this to say, I suppose, that it’s all fine and dandy to make it difficult for foreigners visiting and living in France, though I think it would be better for their economy if they didn’t. However, protecting the recording industry from Google will help neither France’s economy nor their culture. And, it’s just too late. The website www.deezer.com, one of my favorite sites for discovering new music, comes from France. If this doesn’t encourage people to take the next step, digitally, and buy and download music, I don’t know what does. Sites like deezer, shout 4 music and the sixty one (my newest favorite for good music, even if the site is difficult to navigate) are not flash in the pan sites promoting crap music. I suspect France will keep being France, though, with or without the tax.

There have been a lot of faith-restoring stories coming out of the social media world of late. Last week I wrote about the Facebook campaign that has helped save the life of young British student Philip Pain who fell seven-stories in Mexico and was in desperate need of blood. This week I want to acknowledge the huge effort made by social networking pages to help the people of Haiti.

Only minutes after the devastating earthquake floored the tiny Caribbean nation last Tuesday, the online world was mobilised and ready to help in any way it could.

One of the organisations leading the way was The Disasters Emergency Committee (DEC) who have now raised over £25 million after their appeal was announced on Twitter on last Wednesday.

The DEC has utilised Twitter, Facebook, Flickr and YouTube over the past week and their Chief Executive, Brendan Gormley, has publicly praised the significant role these social media sites have had in their campaign.

Mr. Gormley said, “Social networking has proven itself as a valuable addition to the fundraising machine. I’m thrilled that we have been able to quickly communicate and engage the UK public, who have in turn responded with tremendous generosity to help the people of Haiti who so urgently need our help.

“Their donations mean our member agencies can continue to source and deliver the emergency supplies needed like safe water, shelter, medicine and food. We hope people will continue to give their support so that more emergency aid can be added to what will be a massive humanitarian effort.”

DEC reported on Facebook that Flickr has been used to host images from the DEC’s member agencies, with 34,000 views of the DEC account on Friday, while a video of the DEC broadcast appeal has attracted nearly 4,000 views on YouTube.

Not only has social media been an outstanding tool to stimulate aid and increase donations, it has also played a vital role in spreading news and remarkably, locating victims.

“This is the first example we’ve seen where that sense of global community has been expressed in action, for example using social media technology to get the story out faster, to locate victims, and to give instantaneous donations,” said James Norrie, a media professor at RTS’s School of IT Management. “That’s an amazing use of a social media tool.”

The events in Haiti, while both shocking and saddening, have reinforced social media’s undoubted ability for social good.

I think Tom Brown, writing for The Burlington Free Press, captured it well when he wrote, “I’ve heard critics of social media say that users of communication tools such as Twitter and Facebook only want to talk to, and about, themselves and their friends. The earthquake in Haiti might help change the minds of some of those critics”.

“When people can respond that quickly and in such numbers to help their fellow man, then there certainly is hope”.

To make a donation to the DEC Haiti Earthquake Appeal visit www.dec.org.uk or call 0370 60 60 900, donate over the counter at any post office or high street bank, send a cheque made payable to ‘DEC Haiti Earthquake Appeal’ to ‘PO Box 999, London, EC3A 3AA’ or text GIVE to 70077 to donate £5. £5 goes to DEC. You pay £5 plus your standard network SMS rate.

The family of a young British student who fell from a seventh-floor balcony in Mexico have praised the Facebook campaign that has kept their son alive.

Philip Pain, 20, was rushed to hospital on New Years Day suffering from two broken legs, a broken lower back and crushed internal organs. With doctors fearing his rare O-negative blood type would leave them without enough blood to save him, Philip’s family and friends at home in Bexleyheath, Kent, launched a Facebook campaign to call on anyone who shared Philip’s blood-type to donate blood.

The Facebook campaign which now has over 13, 000 members has gathered enough blood to stabilise Philip and doctors believe without it he would not have survived. There is a chance a part of Philip’s foot may have to be amputated, but doctors have almost entirely ruled out any brain damage. While there is still some way to go, Philip’s condition is improving and his family have expressed their gratitude to everyone who has helped out.

Philip’s sister Stephanie Pain told KentOnline: “It’s been really overwhelming. People are tracking his progress who have never met him or any of the family. It’s very encouraging.”

“It has been fantastic that complete strangers are walking into hospital to give up their blood but we need it to continue,” she wrote on Facebook. “Without the blood that has reached Phil so far, he would not be alive as we speak. He is still in an induced coma but fingers crossed he can be weaned out of this next week. This is a dangerous time for him I have been warned so please keep praying.”

Philip’s father Neil Pain posted on Facebook: “I would like to thank all of you personally for the kind words and the proactive action that some of you have been able to offer.”

Join the Facebook campaign here.

If you know someone in the Mazatlan area in Mexico with type-O Negative blood ask them to contact the Sharp Hospital in Mazatlan on 66998656(78-84).

Something I came across today on mashable about Facebook and their new privacy settings seemed a good add on to my earlier post ‘P-R-I-V-A-C-E-E’. I’m on the fence about the privacy issue, sort of. But, while there are 6,453 settings already within FB, why not just give people all the options they want for privacy. It seems to me that not being able to hide some of your actions on your wall will only A) force people to work while at work, B) force people to be a lot less friendly (I wish Facebook were actually called ‘Friendster’. It’s too bad the name was already in use) and accept less friend requests to keep their privacy C) Chase away those hold outs who you’ve been trying to convince to join for the last two years. The gap between ‘those who will join one day’ and ‘those who will NEVER, not until hell freezes over’ grows wider when they hear you talking about the last scrap you got into with a friend or at work over something you posted on FB that you thought they couldn’t see.

As for me? Meh. But I purposefully chose the image for this post because I guess you could say that FB is staying true to their slogan. Talk about being ambivalent, eh?

Rumor has it the estate of the late author, Philip K Dick, has issued a cease and desist to the Google conglomeration over their usage of the term ‘Nexxus’ for their new Google Phone. According to PC World online, Dick’s daughter find there is an obvious connection between the usage of Nexxus and her father’s book ‘Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep’. Seeing as the operating system used on the phone is called ‘Android’, one could argue that it’s not a huge leap from one to the other. Being a huge fan of the movie Blade Runner, I often find myself looking for tips of the cap in current movies, products, and books, either to Dick’s book or to the movie Blade Runner. You can easily find nods within the movie Minority Report (based on the 1958 book of the same name by Dick) to the noir style employed by Scott in BR. It’s easy to see the similarities in the fun and colorful Besson movie The Fifth Element, as well. As for products,  the light saber umbrella pictured here was the only product I could find before Google gave me one of these. I find myself tiring ever so quickly of the Google empire, but I did stumble across something fun on mashable this afternoon as I was getting ready to write this post. That’s one Google product I’d be willing to pay money for.

So, Rage Against The Machine has snatched UK’s beloved Christmas number one spot from X-Factor winner Joe McElderry.

When Jon and Tracy Morter organised a Facebook group last month their sole aim was to end the monopoly Simon Cowell and his X-Factor buddies had on the coveted UK Christmas single. What it turned out to be was something slightly bigger.

For those of you who somehow missed this story. Jon and Tracy Morter are a couple from Essex who started a Facebook group called “Rage Against The Machine For Christmas Number 1” because they were “fed up” with X-Factor’s four-year chart dominance during festive season.

“Fed up of Simon Cowell’s latest karaoke act being Christmas No 1? Me too … So who’s up for a mass-purchase of the track ‘KILLING IN THE NAME’ from December 13^th as a protest to the X Factor monotony?”. With these words, the battle began.

The idea was to encourage ‘real music’ fans to buy American rock-rappers Rage Against the Machine’s expletive-filled 1992 single “Killing in the Name Of” in the lead up to Christmas in order to beat McElderry’s “The Climb” to the Christmas number one spot.

So, why did they choose a 17 year-old song with the words “’F— YOU I WON’T DO WHAT YOU TELL ME” repeated 17 times over a more appropriately-angled, perhaps family-friendly, song for the festive period?

“It’s a rallying cry,” Mr Morter told NME.COM. “It’s been taken on by thousands in the group as a defiance to Simon Cowell’s ‘music machine’.”

“We picked a song that was controversial and has a strong message, and it just seems to have captured everyone’s imagination,” Mrs Morter added.

When he first heard of the campaign, Cowell labeled it as “stupid” and “cynical” and claimed it was specifically directed at him. In the end though, Cowell was gracious in defeat and called Jon and Tracy personally to congratulate them on a “well-deserved win” and a “great fight”.

A great fight it was.

In the beginning, no one really expected them to actually pull this thing off. How could two, relatively average, people from the small town of South Woodham Ferrers in Essex possibly defeat the multi-million dollar empire of music mogul Cowell?

The thing is, this little Facebook group struck a cord with people. It was time to make a stand. It was time stick it to ‘the man’.

What this campaign demonstrated was, by using social media as the medium the ‘little guy’ can make a real difference in this world. When enough people get together and are motivated to really give something a shake, anything is possible.

“The campaign behind RATM is interesting in its own right. If only because, once again, it demonstrates the power — if it can be called that — of the emergent internet radicalism,” writes Phil BC at A Very Public Sociologist.

“With very little time and cost, people are able to register their protest/opposition without the rigmarole of standing in the rain, listening to boring speeches, and beating off the desperate efforts of Trot paper sellers.”

Captain Jako at Frank Owen’s Paintbrush has a similar view on the campaign, “It once again points to the democratic potential of the internet. A grassroots effort coordinated over social networking sites and with zilch budget has proved more effective than the largely traditional marketing techniques used by wealthy industry bigwigs like Simon Cowell to get even more money out of UK consumers.”

Just five years ago, a campaign like Jon and Tracy Morter’s was almost impossible to achieve. However, in Facebook, Twitter and other social media websites, society now has a very real vehicle for change.

Forty is the new Twenty, Fifty is the new Thirty, and so on. This year is seeing an unmistakable and much needed change in the perception towards the aged and ageing. Last week in The New York Times Magazine’s 9th Annual Year in Ideas, alongside Massively Collaborative Mathematics (Using a blog and blog comments to solve complicated equations…where was Google Wave when they needed it!), and The Google Algorithm as Extinction Model (Google, saving the world, once again) was a short piece entitled The Myth of the Deficient Older Person.

The tides are finally turning for older employees, perhaps too late for the thousands who have recently found themselves laid off and brushed off in the interview process (ask my father, who spent two years searching for an upper management position in technology. He recently retired instead). One more reason I’m glad the tides are turning? I’m tired of hearing my friends complaining about their parents being on Facebook. I doubt they’ll be part of the set who spends half their day updating their status while their bosses look on. IStrategy Networks reported that the month of August saw a 25% percent jump in users over 55. You can’t help but think that a huge chunk of a valuable workforce is wasting its talents on Facebook (not that mine aren’t)…

It’s a word I have dismissed from my vocabulary (and now, apparently, my spelling as well). It’s a subject that crops up every once in a while. This past week I caught a FB status update of a friend of mine. She mentioned that she’s getting ready to read the Privacy Act, she actually followed ‘Privacy Act’ with ’2001′, which is good because I was thinking ‘Isn’t that a Tom Clancy book’? The comments following her post quickly cleared up that silliness (I’m quite the spy/action book reader, truth be told) and I moved on. Almost within the same surfing breath, I came across an interesting piece on expectation of privacy.

The post quotes and comments on Google, Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt’s ideas and beliefs on privacy, and FB. There’s some pretty interesting stuff in there. For me, I’m not so young that I don’t recall a life pre-internet and ‘letting my stuff all hang out’ (virtually speaking), but I’m not so old that I freak out every time I happen to search something on Google or order something online. There is something Eric Schmidt says that speaks to people like me: ‘”If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place”…I don’t have any secrets. By design really. Well, not many of them. Of course, this comes from a girl who thought about doing a one woman comedy show on her love life. So I might not fall within the privacy-concerned median. Of course, there is something else he says, directly following that sends just a little shiver up my occasional-downloaded-pirated-movie self: “But if you really need that kind of privacy, the reality is that search engines, including Google, do retain this information for some time. And it’s important, for example, that we are all subject in the United States to the Patriot Act. It is possible that that information could be made available to the authorities.”

It’s an interesting read. Thought provoking?

As Internet Marketing consultants, we spend a noticeable amount of time advising clients on how best ot use social media for marketing and branding purposes. Plenty of blog posts in our industry have documented the dangers of this–we virtually advise companies to let their employees build an online following in order to achieve a commerical goal; however, many companies let employees use personal accounts, tied to their personalities, avatars and non-commerical email addresses. If and when an employee and a business part ways, these social media accounts often leave with the individual. Bloggers involved in online marketing have covered this pretty well; however, there is another question  involved in social media brand building, and that is one of personal self control.

In a recent piece about the “outing” of the famous anonymous blogger Belle de Jour, Paul Carr at Techcrunch stated that “blogging is is, by nature, an egotistical activity”. In the past, Carr has also pontificated on how all forms of expression within social media, including activity on Facebook and Twitter, are egocentric activities. They are addictive, even to the less egocentric user. Once heavily involved in an online community which prompts a person to share details, photographs, opionions, etc, many people simply fall in love with the sound of their own fingernails tapping away on their keyboards.

For commercially-focused social media, this is dangerous. It takes a lot of self control to maintain professionalism in an online environment where personality-driven sharing is the norm, in-fighting is rampant and people are encouraged to be as open as possible. Combine this with the fact that simply blogging and tweeting about hard-line, corporate subjects ends up reading like a stream of press releases. Which doesn’t exactly invite readers and followers. If someone is to combine the benefits of social media usage with commercial success, they must be able to interact as humans without devolving into using their accounts to further their personal agendas.

It sounds simple enough, and yet people fail to keep their egos at bay when representing a brand all the time. Even when the brand is something close to the blogger or twitterer’s heart, it is important to keep a check on how your personality is influencing what you write and how you view the service. Is the service becoming an outlet for your own politics, posteuring or personal whims and fancies?

There is a balance to be struck between caring enough about the content you put online and caring to the extent that commercial ventures become infused with your personality. As an individual, it is not necessarily good for you to invest your entire life in an online sharing manner, such as Twitter. As a businessperson, you risk alienating an audience that sees your professionalism slip into egotism.

Google’s much-publicised efforts to turn YouTube into a profitable entity may be nearing an end with the company announcing that 1080p full resolution HD videos are on their way.

Earlier this year Credit Suisse analyst, Spencer Wang said that he believed Google was on course to lose $470.6 million this year mainly because of YouTube’s inability to generate revenue from advertising.

Surely YouTube’s irresistable global presence is enough to make Google an absurd amount of cash via advertisements? Apparently not.

According to the advertising experts, it is YouTube’s video quality that is holding it back in the advertising world.

At a recent press conference that hosted some of the leading minds in advertising, CEO of marketing giant GroupM Interaction, Rob Norman, put it bluntly when he described the technical quality of YouTube, and sites like it, as “complete crap”.

Media agency executive Robert Davis of OgilvyInteractive viewed it similarly, saying, “If somebody put that on TV looking that way, they’d be fired…Why is that acceptable online?”

Last week YouTube blogged the news that should change all that.

“We’re excited to say that support for watching 1080p HD videos in full resolution is on its way. Starting next week, YouTube’s HD mode will add support for viewing videos in 720p or 1080p, depending on the resolution of the original source, up from our maximum output of 720p today.

As resolution of consumer cameras increases, we want to make sure YouTube is the best home on the web to showcase your content. For viewers with big monitors and a fast computer, try switching to 1080p to get the most out of the fullscreen experience.”

While YouTube’s announcement focus’s on the benefits for its users, there is no doubt they will be licking their lips at what the change will mean for them.

Advertisers have applauded YouTube’s latest move. After hearing the announcement, Mr Davis told Beet TV that “this is very good news for the industry”.

“As the visual experience becomes more satisfying, the greater the interactive potential becomes for brands ready to play in the content space. For years, we have been forced to build interactive experience around severely limited, technologically inferior video. Not any more.”

So YouTube has given advertisers what they’ve asked for. Now, can they turn this phenomenon into the cash cow it probably deserves to be?

Check out one of YouTube’s full HD videos below

Or click through and watch the Official Toy Story 3 Teaser Trailer in HD