Digital Marketing First 2010 in twitpics (and one instagram)

I had rushed to Digital Marketing First 2010 just in time for my keynote on ROI of Social Media. Some Twitpics from the audience:

   

Afterwards I featured in a movie Emakina was shooting. Still not sure what they'll do with the footage but it was big fun to make.

   

The Groupon Sense of Humour

The copywriters at deal-of-the-day website Groupon are masters of absurd imagery and mixed metaphors. An example:

If your eyes are the windows to your soul, your hair is the tunnel to your mind. Keep your mind-matter from escaping with today's hair-taming Groupon. For $35...

But even in this universe, there are some things they would never talk about, let alone make fun of.
Humor Taboos:

• Mullets, Snuggies, midgets, ligers (over-used, unfunny humor crutches).
• Unicycles, mimes
• Zombies, Pirates, Ninjas, Pandas, Unicorns, Bears, Sharks, at least not in the hipster context that usually conjoins these things
• Steer clear of jokes that could offend religious people. Even if it seems harmless and playful, there are some religious people who will freak out. It's not worth the headache.
  • Example of great teeth whitening joke that got us lots of angry letters & just wasn't worth it: 'whiten by an average of eight shades, equivalent to being punched by God twice.'
  • Roman mythology is an innocuous substitute: 'whiten by an average of eight shades, equivalent to being punched by Zeus twice.'"

Paris, New York. Baguettes, or bagels?

Paris versus New York: a tally of two cities: "A friendly visual match between those two cities, as seen by a Parisian-based-and-lover on New York : details, cliches and contradictions."

Book in a box: 100% discount code

I love reading. I love books. Books take us to faraway places and explain the world around us. I love getting books as a present, but I can imagine it's not always easy to pick one. Enter book in a box [site in Dutch]. Like bongo vouchers, but for books.

Want to try it out? Take a look at this code: 5DX5PS3GAKPMDW8. The five first who use this to order a book in a box gets 100% discount (warning: on most, but not all books). Let me know in the comments which box you picked.

Take the MINI and run

Damn, I wish I were in Stockholm to play this game.

YouTube - MINI Getaway Stockholm 2010.: "This reality game challenges you to do the impossible: stay at least 50 metres away from everybody else in Stockholm city between October 31st and November 7th 2010. If you succeed, you win the new MINI Countryman.

Check out the complete game rules in the app or at minigetawaystockholm.com."

Esther Dyson: "Your customer is an individual, not someone in a bucket"

Picture by Joi Ito. Esther Dyson (@edyson on Twitter) is a journalist and commentator on emerging digital technology. At the Pivot marketing conference in New York City last Monday, she stated that online privacy is a marketing problem. Her thoughts on a new, more personal tone of voice for marketing professionals when they talk to customers is also noteworthy:

Know your customer, and talk to that person as an individual, not as someone in a bucket. Don’t talk to them as ‘Millennials,’ talk to them as ‘You, Joe, who checked in at Times Square last week.’ Take that same consumer intelligence, take that same creativity, take that same ability to personalize and apply it to these people’s data. Explain to them what you know about them in a personal way, in a way they can understand. And then they will trust you; they will make up their minds do we want the free content or not, but it will be a genuinely two-way transaction where there’s real disclosure and real consent. It’s shocking to me that with all the creativity in this industry we can’t figure out how to explain to our own customers what it is we’re doing to them and have them genuinely part of the conversation rather than watching them from behind the two-way mirror.

Etsy Vintage Timeline

Etsy Vintage Timeline "arranges vintage listings by date so you can see how things have changed through the ages."

Polaroid snapshot of New York influential creatives

Interesting trailer [SLYT] for the upcoming short documentary Influencers [FB link] about "what it means to be an influencer and how trends/ideas become contagious today in music and fashion." Interesting if only for the definitions of what an influencer is:

• Somebody who has a different way of thinking, and a different way of expressing themself.
• An early adopter, that embraces all forms of culture.
Someone who's creative or invents things, or recognise what the next thing is.
• A person who can take an idea, a brand, a concept and can bring it to mainstream.

The Social Network movie: why you should not wait for DVD

I went to see The Social Network and the only annoying thing about this movie is that most of its plot is pretty ironic:

• Someone who appears to be rather Aspergy founds the world's largest network of "friends"
• This film tells a creation story, but without any clear hero or villain
• A professional musician (Justin Timberlake) plays the part of the founder of Napster
• The main part of the film is about people suing Mark Zuckerberg; I think the film maker was so scared of being sued himself that he didn't dare to portray any of the characters in black or white terms. It's all greyish.

Nevertheless, I think it's a movie you definitely have to go see. During my keynote at the movie's avant première in Kinepolis last week, I talked about the many ways Facebook has changed our lives. And come to think of it: Facebook has changed the way we behave online even more than Google did. Slide 20 may need a bit of an explanatioin: three years ago, I installed a Facebook app that allowed you to catalogue all the Apple products you've owned and used. The app also allowed you to connect with other Apple fans in your area. And guess what, one of them lived just a few blocks away. It started with a gentle Facebook "poke" and now we're moving into our own house. So if I should ever meet Mark Zuckerburg, I want to shake his hand!

How Facebook changed the way we live our lives and do business

View more presentations from Clo Willaerts.