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Lionsgate films may have an unintentional hit on their hands. Of course, all movie studios want a hit film, but when you hear "horror movie staring Elisha Cuthbert" what do you think of? I immediately think of the sub par House of Wax, staring, along side Cuthbert, Paris Hilton.
So few horror movies are bona fide hits these days that sometimes you have to do something wrong just to get some interest. That's what happened with the new Lionsgage/Elisha Cuthbert horror movie bowing to screens in May titled Captivity.
It appears that someone put up the wrong billboard campaign. The ads, approved by neither company nor the MPAA, have popped up all over L.A. and are now being removed at the studio's expense due to complaints.
After Dark said the posting of the billboards was an accident. CEO Courtney Solomon said the wrong files were sent to the printer, who then passed them on to the billboard company without approval from any executives at After Dark. Executives from the indie production company were attending the ShoWest industry convention in Las Vegas last week and had no idea the wrong billboards were posted until they returned from the convention on Thursday to a flood of e-mails and phone calls from angry parents and offended women.
What a great way to generate some buzz for your (most likely) sub par horror flick!
"Personally, I wasn't going to go with this campaign. I thought it was OTP (over the top)," Solomon said. "Nothing like this can ever happen again." Sources close to the MPAA said the organization had not approved the four-frame ad for Captivity, and the posting of the ad was in clear defiance of MPAA rules and regulations.
I've got no reason not to believe this wasn't a genuine accident but you got to think that the studio and the production company are desperately trying to find out who is responsible so they can give them a raise!
As for the move billboards themselves. Yes, there is a single frame (of four) that I would call objectionable. But you can judge for yourself.
Google gives users of their personalized home page a choice between different decorative “skins”.
Google has since 2005 given users the possibility of designing their own personalized home pages.
Beside the Google search field they may add news headlines, RSS feeds, weather reports, games, entertainment… Well, there is no end to the number of modules available.
In our December article What we want from Google this Christmas we argued that people should get the chance to decorate this home on the Web.
Under the headline “Give us a better mashup” we said:
“And we want it to look sexy in the Apple kind of way. Yes, we know it is childish, but this is Christmas and we want to dress up our default home page with elegant skins!”
We are glad to report that Google does now, in fact, offer skins. You may decorate your home page with a selection of themes, including “classic”, “beach” and “bus stop”. Each theme has a different banner and a related color scheme.
Design naïf
Actually, the designs are not “sexy in the Apple kind of way”. There are no gradients or semi-transparent icons, no “Woow!” factor or Prada like moments. Instead Google has chosen more “naive” or “cute” expressions: comic book or even children book styles are apparent.
Still, we like them!
Monetizing skins
Wired argues that Google may use themes for generating revenue, offering custom, branded homepage themes for corporations.
They may also invite others to design new skins.
Fast’s Alchemist
Fast’s Alltheweb search engine did this as early as in 2002. In our article Fast AlltheWeb adds Alchemist CSS customization tool we pointed out that you can use cascading style sheets (CSS)to change the design (but normally not the content) of any Web page quite dramatically. Hence: If you control the CSS-file, you control the look of the Web page.
Fast gave users control of their CSS-file, giving users the power to design the AlltheWeb home page. Or, more correctly, they gave users the chance to point their home page to a CSS file of your own design.
Fast is no longer the owner of Alltheweb, and that search site is now more or less a Yahoo! clone.
Google is using CSS when designing their themes, though. The logical next step is to start a skin competition, or — even — allowing users to upload or link to their own CCS files.
Matt Bailey of Site Logic Marketing and I will be teaming up early next week to present this month's free ClickTracks seminar. The webinar, titled "Social Media: Should You Digg It?" will include Matt and I taking a common sense approach to social media marketing. We'll explore what social marketing entails, explain when and why it might work for your business and will dig into the log files of some sites that have experienced social media hits. Yep, we'll even delve into the great pork fiasco.
The full class description:
Social media marketing is currently one of the most talked about online marketing tactics. "Just get your site on Digg" is a common refrain among popular Internet bloggers. For online marketers, this begs the questions: Is there value in social media? More pointedly, will social media marketing produce conversions or just fleeting spikes in traffic?
Blogs, social bookmarks, podcasts, video clips, and wikis have taken on a life of their own. But, what does social networking mean to your business? Does the adage "any publicity is good publicity" hold true here?
The class runs on Monday, March 26th at 1pm (EST) and on Tuesday, March 27th at 10am (EST). Space is limited, so register online if you plan on attending.
The ClickTracks guys have also agreed to turn on ALL of the advanced features in ClickTracks Appetizer next week. That means you can play around with funnels, advanced labeling, search and keyword reporting, campaign reports and more. If you've been debating buying ClickTracks, this is a great chance to take ClickTracks for a test drive...if you haven't been debating, here's a chance to see why you should.
If you haven't already signed up, don't forget that Microsoft's Small Business Summit is running all this week. In fact, you can catch me speaking tomorrow at 2pm (EST) on the topic "Get a Higher Profile on the Web." Registration is free and you can attend a wide range of webinar sessions throughout the week.
You can register online at the Small Business Summit web site and can then browse through all of the scheduled sessions for the week. There are a couple of sessions on Thursday that look quite interesting...
Gregg Spiridellis, the co-founder of JibJab Media (remember the "This Land is Your Land" political cartoon?) will be talking on Buzz Marketing and Gretchen Ritter will talk about "Avoiding Burn-Out: Work Life Balance" on Thursday afternoon.
The entire summit is devoted to all things small business related, so if you haven't already checked out the line-up, you might want to see if there's anything that you can't afford to miss. (Other than my session, of course!)
When I first visited Twitter, it took me all of 30 seconds to decide it was uninteresting. I kept my persuasion for months as the buzz about Twitter kept growing. Last week, I changed my mind. Here is why I am now a twitterer – although a cautious one.
What is Twitter?
If you have been offline for months or if, like a growing number of my friends, you feel a need to protect yourself from even more tools, communities and swarms you need to keep up with, you might benefit from this short explanation before I go on to discuss the pros and cons of twittering:
Twitter is like a public instant messenger (IM) network, an instant social networking service or a kind of microblogging. This is called continuous partial presence. The idea is adding persistence to instant messaging and status messages.
The core of the concept of Twitter is to answer the question ”What are you doing?” Twitter allows you to answer this question by posting one-line messages. These messages may be published by using the Twitter web interface, by using an instant messenger, or by way of SMS mobile phone text messaging.
You can limit who sees the messages to people you’ve explicitly added to your friends list, or you can make the messages public.
For a more detailed explanation of everything Twitter, have a look at the Newbie’s guide to Twitter.
Why?
My initial reaction was “Why?” Why would I bother posting tiny blurbs about my more or less trivial thoughts and actions when there are thousands of online opportunities to write continuous text – paragraphs, pages or even volumes of it – in a meaningful context and within a genre that supplies a common ground for interpretation?
A simple answer would be “It doesn’t have to be literature – it’s just a way of keeping in touch.” This might very well be the case, but I am already presented with more ways to keep in touch than I can handle without experiencing information overload.
The Passionate Blog has an interesting post about Twitter and the brain thrashing threshold.
Still, for me there were two things that tipped the scales in Twitter’s direction.
The first one is that a number of the blogs I follow are on Twitter now. Twitter can alert me when there are new posts at blogs and sites like Search Engine Land, Mashable and Technorati, among others. BBC and The New York Times are also present.
You can follow Pandia by searching for pandianews.
A good tip is to be really careful about who you choose to follow in Twitter. If the amount of updates climb to a certain level, I find that it ruins the experience for me.
The other winning point is that Twitter is integrated with IM. I would have thought that if I want to prevent (or at least ease) information overload, this would be a bad thing. But it’s not.
I don’t have to go visit Twitter to see what my friends are up to. I don’t have to go to Search Engine Land http://searchengineland.com/ to see what Danny is posting. All I have to do is take a look at the Twitter window in my IM client. And if I get the urge to share my latest little everyday victory, I can post it to twitter in the same window.
Will it last?
Blogger and web prophet Om Malik has decided that Twitter is already passé. I don’t have his crystal ball, so I have to say it is too early to tell. Personally, I find the way Twitter combines IM, blogging, and RSS very convenient and I find myself hoping it’s not a fad.
According to the statistics posted at Waxy, Twitter is still growing, and growing fast. It is just a matter of time before the growth slows down – probably a short time, given that time moves so very quickly online.
Twitter life hacking
One way of dealing with the strain of continuous partial presence is RSS. Your Twitter user account has an RSS stream, and if you add it to your RSS aggregator of choice, you can who’s been twittering and about what – when the time is right.
If you publish a Wordpress blog and want people to be able to follow it on Twitter, you don’t have to send an update for every post. In stead, install the Twitter Updater plugin.
If you don’t use IM but still want to follow Twitter and post what you are doing without visiting the web site, try Twitteriffic for Mac and Twitteroo for PC. Twapper is a Twitter client for mobile phones.
Links and further reading
Follow Pandia on Twitter
Lifehack: 5 ways to use Twitter for good
Web Worker Daily: Eight ways Twitter is useful professionally
Slacker Manager: The Several Habits of Wildly Successful Twitter Users
The Twitter Fan Wiki
The Spring 2007 eComXpo starts tomorrow and runs through Wednesday. It's free to attend the live keynotes and panels, though you'll need to pay $49 to register for eComXpo University where you can pick up the shows to watch at your leisure. You can also work your way through the online trade show where you'll have the chance to review information from exhibitors and to run live chats with their representatives.
Last summer I wrote an article called "The Politicos Still Don't Get It" that talked about how many political consultants and campaign managers just did not grasp the full potential of marketing their candidates online. It looks like the 2008 Presidential candidates and their advisors are finally starting to understand the need to have good online reach.
The Washington Post reports:
"When it comes to campaigns these days, the Internet is not a sideshow anymore, it's front and center," said Carol C. Darr, director of the Institute for Politics, Democracy & the Internet (IPDI), which is part of GW's Graduate School of Political Management.
Online political advertising, though still comprising a small share of the overall ad expenditure, has steadily increased in the past five years, according to the marketing firm PQ Media. It was $5 million in 2002. It totaled $29 million three years ago. Last year it was $40 million.
That shows some great progression, especially since voters have been turning to the Internet for more information on candidates and their campaigns for years anyway. While Howard Dean did an excellent job of utilizing the grass-roots viral marketing potential of the Internet in his 2004 run for the Democratic nomination, it wasn't enough to keep him on track after the scream heard round the world.
We've come a long way since I first blogged about the potential impact of paid search advertising on political campaigns back in 2004. In those days, political campaign advisors were shocked to find out that pay per click even existed. From that article:
"So you don't pay unless they hit you?" asked Joel Bradshaw, a political consultant working on Barbara Boxer's Senate campaign in California. "That is pretty damn good."
These days, paid search is part of the game...but the real focus is on social media marketing.
Community Connect, for example, is encouraging the candidates to interact with members at its specialty social networking sites -- BlackPlanet, MiGente, AsianAvenue and GLEE, a new site targeted at Gays, Lesbians and Everyone Else.
Community Connect chief executive Benjamin Sun said the sites not only create an outlet for candidates to communicate with the niche communities but also give users the forum to share opinions of the candidates and their positions on the issues. For GLEE members, the top issue might be gay marriage, while Latinos at MiGente could be talking about immigration.
I've got to say, it's refreshing to see that a political advisor knows that true social media marketing extends beyond "let's get Dugg!"
In fact, they seem to grasp that social media isn't simply about social bookmarking sites. Hilary Clinton posed a question about health care to Americans via Yahoo! Answers and received more than 24,000 responses in less than 24 hours. John McCain asked about reducing wasteful government spending and received more than 16,000 responses.
It doesn't stop there however...
Already, people are using Yahoo's Group service, which connects people via e-mail and message boards, to talk about the race. So far, more than 700 groups formed around next year's election. In addition, the company has recently launched You Witness News, an offering that allows users to upload their own video clips from events around the country to the site.
Candidates are also launching political blogs, podcasts, YouTube Channels and even interactive online games. (Anyone up for seeing John McCain playing a cowboy out to shoot all the bad guys in Washington or Hilary Clinton desperately balancing bed pans and emesis basins as she races around a hospital cutting costs in a push toward socialized medicine?)
In fact, The Washington Post reported last fall that political parties are way behind traditional companies in terms of taking advantage of the marketing power of the Internet.
Harrah's Casino had the e-mail addresses of 28 million Americans in 2005, far outstripping the databanks of both political parties.
With Internet advertising often offering far better ROI numbers than more traditional forms of marketing, it will be interesting to see how the candidates make use of their online dollars in the campaigning leading up to the November 2008 election.