So the big news here is that, after a joyous six months of working on personal projects and freelancing (at Euro RSCG and MCD Partners), I’ll be starting a new job on January 5th. I’ll be joining Organic, one of the original Silicon Alley interactive agencies (and current Omnicom company), as Director of Strategy. It’s a pure account planning role, where my key responsibility will be to provide consumer insights to our creatives in order to deliver effective client work. The day-to-day will consist of a whole lot of talking to consumers, as well as research, writing, and presentations on digital media.
I’m honestly very excited to start. Organic is a great company (with a great blog), and I think this role will be a really challenging opportunity for me. I’ll probably be working mostly on Bank of America to start, with some new business work thrown in as well.
This past Sunday’s NY Times ran an interesting article on the challenges of using social networks for marketing. This is particularly relevant for me, as one of my freelance projects right now involves creating a Facebook page for a major financial services company. I think the key quote is here:
Independent experts on Web advertising have been watching, however, and what they see is a myriad of difficulties in making brand advertising work on social networking sites. Members of social networks want to spend time with friends, not brands.
I’m reminded of a brand strategy class I took at Stern last summer in which brand benefits were broken into functional, emotional, and self-expressive. Functional benefits speak to actual features and utility (i.e. a car gets me from point A to point B and has automatic transmission), while emotional benefits speak to how a brand makes me feel about myself. Self-expressive benefits matter most in a social context however. When a brand allows consumers to communicate something about themselves, it becomes highly relevant to sites like Facebook. For that reason, I can see brands with strong self-expressive benefits like Apple (“I think different”) or Harley-Davidson (“I’m an all-American tough guy) having effective social networking presences. For brands that lack a self-expressive component, it’s going to be an uphill battle.
I finally launched the site for Figure Four Media, a new side project focusing on web video distribution, strategy, and production. We’re still working through a few things (getting the blog working, for example), but you should be able to get the idea.
Our goal is to do high quality branded content, with a full set of web tools like RSS, comments, sharing/emailing/embedding, as well as integration with the big video sites like YouTube, etc.
So I’ve been throwing around some ideas with friends for a business about online video. Here are some links that I’ve gathered over the last month with useful info.
A friend at work showed me Delicious Library, a new (at least to me) application that uses the built in camera in your mac to scan the barcode of books, DVDs, CDs, etc. It then automatically adds the item to your online and allows you to keep track of who you’ve lent things to by integrating with iCal and Address Book. It’s pretty slick.
I’ve also been playing around with goodreads.com, a social networking site for readers, that allows you to share your reading lists and recommendations with other book enthusiasts. My profile is here.
Both are nice usages of technology in the service of those who like to read.
Between working at DP during the day and going to school at Stern in the evenings, I don’t have nearly as much time these days as I’d like to work on other ideas. One thing I have been thinking a lot about lately, though, is video on the web. This is obviously an area where a lot of innovation is going on, and I’ve got a few ideas myself that I’m developing in my spare time. For the next couple of posts, I’m going to focus on interesting sites from the web video world.
NewTeeVee: The most comprehensive blog out there that I’ve seen devoted entirely to the intersection of technology, the web, and video. Definitely worth checking out on a regular basis.
Blip.tv: A great alternative to YouTube that focuses on the development of ongoing web shows/video blogs, rather than random two minute clips of cats fighting. I don’t believe they are involved in content creation - they just provide the platform for individual producers to get their work out there. These guys also get extra points for being located in NYC. (Note: the video embedded above is from a Blip.tv show from the makers of MAKE magazine - an awesome publication about building robots and death rays in your basement.)
NextNewNetworks: Another NYC based startup, but these guys are focused on the content creation side of the game. Keep an eye on ‘em.
We just heard word that our “social entrepreneurship” entrant into the Stern Business Plan Competition has survived into the “Semi-Finalist Candidate” round. There had been 40 plans in the competition, but only 12 made it into the current round (including us). Now we have to write a full-fledged plan by March 1st, at which point the field will narrow to 4. At stake: $100,000 in prize money!
