davidconnell.net

(Via Dirty Tackle:  Mexican club replace players’ names with Twitter handles on shirts .)

Mexican soccer club Jaguares has replaced player names on the backs of their shirts with Twitter handles that promote both the player and shirt sponsor, Sol beer. As Dirty Tackle explains:

In a bid to get its players (and beer sponsor) a few more followers, the club — which was founded in 2002 — replaced the players’ names on the back of its shirts with each players’ individul Twitter handle. The club also colored the lettering on the orange home shirts in a Twitter teal (or blue…whatever) along with the social networking site’s bird logo.

Now, I love soccer and I love Twitter, but this is a bit much for me. The fact is, a lot of Mexican club shirts are so chock full of sponsors that they basically could be mistaken for NASCAR cars. Adding Twitter handles to this trend — well, it’s just jumping the shark.

It is interesting how enamored people, especially those in the sports world, are with promoting their twitter accounts, but aren’t similarly obsessed with promoting their Facebook accounts. This, despite the fact that Facebook has over seven times the monthly active users that Twitter does. This probably has a lot to do with the default public nature of Twitter, versus the default private nature of Facebook.

Despite the fact that Facebook has developed some pretty great settings to allow users to easily maintain robust and separate public and private profiles on Facebook, this use doesn’t seem to have gotten widespread attention yet. For now, and for the foreseeable future, individuals seem to view Twitter as their public mechanism for sharing content and information, while Facebook is a private means of sharing content and information. Of course this only applies to individuals, it’s now SOP to use both channels to market an organization.

Bored as shyt wanna blaze but at the same time I don't ugh fuck it where's the bowl at spark me up lls

06/23/2011 1:18 am via Twitter for BlackBerry®ReplyRetweetFavorite

@Qwikster

Jason Castillo

Oh boy, Jason Castillo just became the most popular stoner on the interwebs. Last night, Netflix announced it was going to spin off its DVD rental business into a new company called Qwickster while maintaining the Netflix moniker for the company’s streaming business. The two businesses would no longer be tied together in any way. You want DVDs? Go to to Qwickster. You want streaming movies and shows? Go to Netflix. You want both? Subscribe to both.

It’s actually a pretty decent solution for a business in transition. The company can continue to grow and cut deals for its future business — streaming, while satisfying current demand — “send me some DVDs, yo.” Eventually Qwickster will die, but it will probably make some bank in the meantime.

One problem: Netflix forgot to secure the Qwikster Twitter handle before it made the announcement and lock that thing down. Turns out the handle is owned by a fun-loving criminal who represents on the tweet stream with Elmo smoking a joint. He seems like a cool cat, to me but probably isn’t what Netflix had in mind for their new business.

Fundamentals people: If you’re going to start a new business, venture, website, campaign, whatevs, make sure you lock your social media handles down and know what else is out there with your brand on it. Otherwise, your big announcement might be overshadowed by Elmo with a joint. Will this embarrassment  sink Qwickster? Certainly not. Is it a distraction? Certainly, yes.

Now: Puff, puff, pass…

Primary sources for this story: TechCrunch, Twitter

Touch my Lion! Love it! Liebe mein affe-Lion!

Apple released Lion this week and MG Siegler immediately made sweet, sweet love to it.

More useful than @parislemon’s 3,000 word opus: Greg Kumparak’s, “Nine Things you Should Do After Installing Lion“ and Cult of Mac’s ludicrously comprehensive, six-page review/manual.
Via TechChrunch, Cult of Mac
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Speaking at Fortune BrainstormTech, Twitter CEO Dick Costolo said the company will eventually offer self-serve ads for brands and is looking to get into the commerce game. Twitter, he said, wants to “remove friction” from the process of buying stuff on the platform.
If I may offer a humble suggestion from a lowly non-profit marketer: Can you please also help “remove friction” from the process of donating to charities through Twitter?
Via Fortune

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Mmm…. That’s some good Gojee. I’ve seen a lot of people using Gojee recently and am trying it out myself — I’ve been in a bit of a cooking rut these days. The service lets users input ingredients they have in their pantry and spits out recipes (an gorgeous photos) based on those ingredients. I wonder what it will suggest for pita chips, Kraft mac & cheese and craisins? Seriously though, I just typed in “black beans” and favorited 10 recipes. This thing is seriously addictive.

***
Dude… your Prius is pretty badass. Toyota responds to the Honda CR-Z Sport hybrid with the Prius Performance Package. For an extra three grand, you get front and rear spoilers, 17-inch alloy wheels, custom tires, a tuned rear sway bar and…. wait for it… limited edition floor mats. w00t!
Via PSFK

***
Finally, start your weekend off right with this awesome video of the Sesame Street Muppets rockin’ the Sure Shot, by the Beastie Boys:

Sesame Street breaks it down from Wonderful Creative on Vimeo.
Via LaughingSquid

“Add the Follow Button to your website to increase engagement and create a lasting connection with your audience. “

Available in light and dark.

(Via Twitter / Follow Button.)

So, I don’t get a chance to toot my own horn very often — and maybe this was a no brainer — but I was right about Twitter turning TweetDeck into an enterprise solution, a possibility I floated on Tuesday morning after news of the Twitter purchase started going around.

Last night TweetDeck founder Ian Dodsworth made the purchase official on the TweetDeck blog and spelled out future plans for the service:

The mainstream Twitter user-base is well catered for by twitter.com and the official mobile clients. And by becoming part of the official platform, TweetDeck will now fill that role for brands, influencers, the highly active and anyone that just needs ‘more power’.” (Emphasis is all me.)

On the Twitter blog, Dick Costolo also spelled the TweetDeck strategy:

This acquisition is an important step forward for us. TweetDeck provides brands, publishers, marketers and others with a powerful platform to track all the real-time conversations they care about. In order to support this important constituency, we will continue to invest in the TweetDeck that users know and love. (Again, emphasis is mine.)

As I said in my Tuesday post, I am excited to see Twitter keep TweetDeck going and move in this direction. Giving companies and power users a platform with a direct connection to Twitter will open up a lot of possibilities in terms of metrics and finding true influencers. However, there are a lot of smart companies who have made and continue to make great strides in this space. It will be easy for a souped-up version of TweetDeck to knock off the likes of HootSuite and CoTweet. Going up against the likes of Radian6/SalesForce will be tougher. But, I have a feeling Twitter won’t be going after these larger enterprise companies, but instead will be satisfied killing off the smaller players.

Now that Twitter has unofficially officially bought TweetDeck, the question remains: “What the heck are they going to do with it?”

The accepted narrative of the purchase is that this was a defensive move by Twitter. That is, they picked up TweetDeck in order to prevent UberMedia, owner of many other Twitter clients that aren’t made by Twitter, from snatching up TweetDeck and in turn snatching more Twitter market share. Under this premise, it would be perfectly understandable if Twitter simply decided to shutter TweetDeck, kindly ask its existing user base to move over to the official Twitter app and pay Ian Dodsworth to please stop working (or at least work on something non-Twitter related, maybe his new gold house and his rocket car?)

Personally, I don’t like that idea. I don’t like the idea of paying someone good money — hell, great money — just so you can take their product apart and ask them to go away. If I were at Twitter, (alright, pause for a good laugh) I would be pushing to turn TweetDeck into an Enterprise-level software aimed at companies currently managing their social media streams through products like CoTweet and HootSuite. After all, TweetDeck already has many of the features these services have — scheduling tweets, list management, multiple accounts, and access to other social services.

Imagine if Twitter could combine the services TweetDeck already offers with the ability to purchase and manage promoted tweets and accounts within the system; deep statistics on click-throughs, reach and impressions; real influence data on users and real-time conversation monitoring. And that’s just off the top of my head.

To me, turning TweetDeck into a product like that is much more interesting than just shit-canning the whole thing. But, it also represents some significant mission drift for Twitter and it might not be something they want to get into. After all, the enterprise race is moving quickly and companies like SalesForce/Radian6 have already made huge strides in mining social stream for data. It’s unlikely Twitter will be able to catch up in this area, but it could find a nice middle ground servicing smaller companies and power users that can’t pay thousands of dollars for a heavy enterprise solution.

One piece of advice for Twitter: If you decide to move forward with TweetDeck, please for the love of all that is holy, get it off of Adobe Air. I don’t much care whether you make it a web app, a desktop app or a frickin’ ham sandwich, but please no more Adobe Air. Nothing, nothing, good ever comes out of Adobe Air. It simply turns good apps into garbage.

If you’re in non-profit marketing (as I am) you know about charity:water and there’s a good chance you’re obsessed with charity:water. (If you’re in non-profit marketing and you don’t know about charity:water than, frankly, shame on you. You’re not doing your job properly. Before reading the rest of this post go to their site and study what they do.)

A lot of non-profits want to be like charity:water — they want to figure out how to make lots of money online, appeal to GenX donors who are just starting to develop their giving habits and crack the code of social media giving. Never mind that for a lot of non-profits trying to be like charity:water is like asking the Boston Pops to be like Cee Lo Green, they see something that works and they want to emulate it.

My personal feeling is that charity:water has captured lightening in a bottle through a combination of forces, most of which they created themselves, that will be very hard for other non-profits to replicate. However, there’s still a lot we can learn from the group’s success. Below is an analysis of ten things charity:water is doing right along with some hints on how other non-profits can replicate the strategy.

QUICK NOTE: Scott Harrison responds on my staffing assumptions, which were based on the staff list on his website: We actually don’t have (nor have we ever had) a marketing department, but have three total people in Design / Content that produce all the printed work, plus all the work on charity: water + mycharitywater.org.. Even leaner than you thought!

1. Have a brand evangelist who is an amazing story teller.
   If you haven’t heard Scott Harrison speak, do it today. He’s a great and charismatic speaker who understands how to tell a story. In a recent interview with TechCrunch, Harrison noted that he uses over 200 pictures and videos in his standard speech, turning a talk into a multimedia experience.  He is the top evangelist for his brand because he knows the story (it’s his story after all) and because he has the talent for telling it. Finding these ingredients in your CEO might be tough — he or she might not be the founder, or they might not be an inspiring speaker — but every non-profit must have a chief evangelist who can go out and tell their story on the biggest stages.
2. Develop a focused mission that can be stated in 140  characters.
   Just like their for-profit brethren, many non-profits want to grow and expand. After all, the bigger they get, the more people they help, the more habitat they preserve, or the more they
   can influence lawmakers, etc. Growth is good.One of the challenges with growth, however, is it can often bring about an expanded mission. 

   Take The Nature Conservancy (where I work) as an example. A non-profit that used to be about simply preserving and protecting land in the United States is now working in 33 countries around the world on issues like climate change, freshwater supplies and marine health. Certainly we still buy and protect our fair share of land, but our mission has expanded dramatically. That’s a great thing for the environment, but its a marketing challenge. Charity:water doesn’t have that problem. Their message is simple: Provide clean drinking water to the most underprivileged people in the world. They aren’t about protecting rivers, or forests, or  microfinance. All areas they could conceivably “grow into.”

   If you’re a non-profit you should be able to convey your core mission with some specificity  — and it doesn’t have to be all that you do — in 140 characters or less. If you can’t do it, keep refining until you’ve discovered your essence. (Full disclosure, I don’t think the Conservancy can do this yet.)

3. Have an emphasis on, and passion for design and marketing.
   Charity:water doesn’t think like a non-profit, they think like a consumer-focused tech start-up. They want to make their product (yes, all non-profits are selling a product) a must-have among the coolest, trendiest people in their target demographic. They then let these cool, trendy people tell their friends who are also cool and trendy (but perhaps less so) about the product and it takes off from there through an ever-widening pyramid of influence. Companies like Twitter and Instagram don’t advertise in magazines, they don’t do TV commercials pleading with us to save puppies. They make something cool and irresistible that a lot of people want to get in on.The backbone of this type of marketing is design that makes the product  irresistible. Charity:water has that, almost all other no-profits don’t. Non-profits traditionally market an organization, not a product. and it shows in the design decisions they make. Harrison is passionate about design. He noted in a recent TechCrunch interview that the second person he  hired was a designer. His wife is Charity:water’s creative director and 40 percent of his staff is dedicated to marketing functions. (See note above) He has gone all-in on marketing his product in a smart way and he has success to show for it.
4. Never put out crap — ever.
   I don’t get a lot of email from Charity:water, but when I do I always open it and I always read it because it’s always something of a very high-quality that’s going to hold my interest. Because they have a focused mission, a small staff and a high concentration of marketing staff, the organization seems to be able to spend a lot of time on, and put a lot of care into, the pieces they produce. Everything is of the absolute highest quality and standards.Excellence in creation is sorely missing in the non-profit world. In fact, some of us seem to take pride in creating crap. It’s as if having a crappy website, or an amateurish, poorly produced video is a point of pride — because our marketing is crap we’re clearly spending our money on doing the work on the ground. “Just look at our four star Charity Navigator rating as proof!” 

   Sorry, but that’s BS. Your marketing is crap, because it’s crap. By the way, try finding charity:water’s Charity Navigator ranking on their site — you can’t. They don’t wear it like a badge of honor because they know that marketing their product is far more important than some third-party verifier about their organization that their target audience doesn’t know about or understand. Again, they are marketing their product, not their organization. Which brings me to…

5. Market your product, not your organization
   I sometimes think there’s a notion among some in the non-profit world that people are coming to their sites on a daily basis — or at least several times a week — to see what the organization is up to. They believe, wrongly, that supporters are using their site like The New York Times, coming to browse the weekly “News of the Non-Profit.” This leads them to believe that if they don’t post something new several times a week support will evaporate. This turns these non-profits into quasi-news agencies, creating feature stories, interviews and long written content that does a great job of selling the organizational process, but not such a good job of selling the organization’s product — their particular solution to the World’s troubles. 

   This would be like going to the Nike homepage and instead of being served a big splash of the latest Nike shoe or campaign and prominent links into its product lines, you were served a stream of feature stories highlighting how great Nike’s manufacturing process is, who its great partners are, what wonderful  shoe designers it has, and the latest musings from the CEO. All fascinating stuff for sure, but nothing really about the shoes you want to buy.Charity:water doesn’t market the organization, it markets the product — clean drinking water for the world’s poor by drilling wells — and how visitors can buy (aka. donate to) that product.

6. Understand that the web is a visual medium.
   There is a place for the written word on the web: It’s below a stunning picture, a well-executed video, or an informative graphic. Over the last five years, the web has moved from being a medium for the written word to one that is highly visual. Increased access to broadband and the proliferation of sites like YouTube and Flickr have given everyone, from the small-time blogger to the largest corporation, the ability to host and serve high-quality visual media and — even more importantly –  given users the ability to consume and share this content. In mobile, some of the most successful startups — ie. Instagram — have been in the photo sharing space. 

   Users don’t read on the web. They look at pictures, they skim, read highlighted text and flit around like hummingbirds looking for a big bright flower. Charity:water understands this principle and fills their site with big bright flowers — photos, videos and graphics that tell the story visually and don’t require the user to read a stitch of text.Their current “Why Water” campaign is a perfect example of this principle. Certainly there is text to read if you want more details, but it’s not necessary to read a thing in order to understand the story.

   If you’re a non-profit struggling to adapt to the visual web, here are some things you can do right now to start to adjust:

   • Stop referring to your site visitors as “readers” and start referring to them as “users.” (Note: Interesting comment on this below.)
   • Make text subservient to images. Every page should have an image at the top.
   • Don’t diss your video content by making it a tiny thumbnail that people have to click on to activate a pop-up box in order to read. (See how painful that sounds?) You’ve spent a lot of time and potentially money making that video, post it loud and proud at the top of the page.
   • Don’t write anything over 500 words again, ever. (Yes, I understand the irony of this statement in an essay that’s now cranking past 1500 words.)
7. Have friends in high places.
   Before starting charity:water, Scott Harrison was a nightclub promoter in New York City. From what I can tell, he was the dude who organized big celeb parties, got the bottles of Crystal on the table and charged ludicrous prices (possibly to Ludacris) for hard alcohol. After several trips to Africa photographing cleft palette surgeries, he decided to change his life and start charity:water. He also found God, but he doesn’t preach his conversion. 

   Harrison’s unique history is an asset on its own, but the connections he’s been able to make and the constituencies he can cultivate as a result of this history are unparalleled. Harrison can presumably move from celebrities, to relief organizations, to evangelicals without missing a beat. More recently, because of charity:water’s success and their ability to embrace the tech start-up aesthetic, he’s been cultivating entrepreneurs and VCs in Silicon Valley. The TechCrunch interview, for example, was filmed after a presentation to a room full of  Silicon Valley elite.

   A guy who could potentially set up lunch with Will Smith, Ev Williams and Rick Warren is a powerful asset indeed.

8. Keep it lean.
   From my very outside view, it seems like the biggest challenge facing charity:water right now is managing growth. While they’ve had a ton of early success, they are still small, even in the non-profit world. But they have massive ambitions and they need to be able to fulfill those ambitions while staying lean. As I stated earlier, close to 40 percent of their current staff is dedicated to marketing — but that’s only eight people. According to Harrison, Charity: water has three total staff dedicated to content and design.
    

   An eight person marketing staff, A three-person content and design staff, with their roles very clearly defined, means no bureaucracy, no review committees and no turf battles. It means eight three people get together in a room, make a decision and drive the product forward. Big non-profits are going to be hard-pressed to replicate this type of thinking, but what they can do is empower their marketing staff to make more independent decisions, turn ideas into products and be OK with failure.

   This can’t just be something people say, either. It has to be translated into the structure and operations of the organization.You can’t have a sprawling org chart with three review committees and tell staff, “Go make things happen, be creative, you have permission to fail!” Because what they’re really hearing and seeing is, “Go, make things happen, be creative, you have permission to fail, as long as you complete this three-page strategic brief; consult strategic communications, digital marketing, the  leadership team and field operations; present to the web network; put your brief through the website review committee, and — of course — consult Legal.”

9. Don’t do the work yourself.
   So, the real secret to charity:water’s success is that they don’t actually drill any wells. They’re not a relief organization, they’re a fundraising operation that gives money to trusted partners on the ground who then use the money to drill and maintain the wells. This allows them to focus on their marketing message rather than dealing with the messy work that actually happens on the ground. They have great on-the-ground partners to do all of that for them.When it comes down to it, charity:water is a marketing and fundraising firm for clean water and 25 organizations that provide it.
10. Let your supporters do the work for you.
    A lot of non-profits pay lip-service to this idea. They talk about finding their champions and advocates and having them carry the torch for the cause. Unfortunately, what this often means is putting up another user-generated content ask that creates more assets for the charity, but little long-term good will from the supporters.Charity:water turns this thinking on its head and actually provides its supporters with beautifully produced assets they can use on blogs and social networking sites. They’ve even created twitter backgrounds to help spread the word. 

    And then there’s charity:water’s personal fundraising space, mychariy:water, which has raised over $8 million from supporter-run fundraising campaigns. The site is not only beautifully designed and an actual pleasure to sign up for, it includes a host of celebrity fundraisers, from Adam Lambert to Twitter’s Biz Stone, to help keep participants motivated. The combination of design and celebrity are a powerful force in this instance, creating true engagement and a space that users want to participate in.

These are ten of the big things I’ve identified that have put charity:water at the top of the non-profit marketing game. They are by no means the biggest charity in the world, nor are they raising the most money in the non-profit space (they’re not even close, actually). But they are on the cutting edge of what it takes to get GenX and GenY donors engaged and opening their wallets.

Most non-profits will not be able to replicate all of these strategies. Many simply don’t have the leadership and vision in place to think like charity: water, others are beset with red tape and legal impediments and still others may simply be too big and unwieldy to make these kids of changes. But every non-profit should take a hard look at charity:water, figure out what makes them tick and replicate what they can. Otherwise, they’ll be left with a donor base that’s dying instead of growing.

The always sexy Yanko Design notes the futuristic Cityline concept bus.

TechCrunch has a running list of all the April Fools Day crap jokes on the interwebs. My favorite: maybe the LinkedIn connections, it’s fairly cute.

Don’t fuck with Android … anymore. BusinessWeek reports that the great Google Gods have started telling mobile carriers and device makers that tweaks to Android and outside partnerships must meet Googleplex approval. The big if: If you want to have early access to Google’s most recent builds. My guess is that the carriers will value their NASCAR partnerships more than the latest version of Google’s tasty deserts. A clamp down on Android overlays would actually be good for users, IMHO. Every version if Android I’ve seen — except for the pure version — pretty much sucks. John Gruber fires a hot daring fireball at the Google brass over their “open” pledge.

Sticking with  BusinessWeek (kicking it old school this morning), they’ve got an analysis of Amazon’s Cloud Player and how you actually get your music up there from iTunes. In a word: aaaaawkwaaard. Music in the cloud is coming — Apple and Google are also working on it. Amazon got there first, but its system is imperfect. Apple will get there next and kick everyone’s ass for ease of use — my guess is one-button upload from iTunes into the company’s North Carolina server farm. Google will come up with something convoluted and the geeks will love it because it’s “open” and not Apple.

Pixar’s next film is, predictably, Cars 2 but after that the genius factory is rolling to the Scottish highlands for Brave, an epic adventure that features a young archer going up against some “mythical beasts.” I am Rogue has some early concept art for the film. Epic indeed.

Breaking News from CNN: Americans don’t know shit about what the government spends their money on, but they’re mad as hell about it!

President Obama gave a speech on domestic drilling for oil and natural gas energy policy this week that was widely panned by enviros and tepidly praised by policy thinkers. Time’s incomparable Bryan Walsh has the easily digestible details.

ReadWriteWeb and HubSpot answer the age-old question: When should I tweet for maximum firepower? The Answer: when people are bored at work. In other words, late in the morning and late in the day. In other news: Don’t spam your Facebook followers if you want them to still “like” you.

There’s a lot of dead wood in the tweet stream. BusinessInsider and aprogrammer with a full Twitter API account found that of Twitter’s 175 million registered users, 56 million accounts have no followers and 90 million have zero followers. That last number means that over half of Twitter’s users have no one following them — that’s a serious problem for a social network.

Want to create viral content? BuzzFeed and Huffington Post co-founder Jonah Peretti tells you how on TechCrunch. Well, not really, but there are some interesting tidbits here on creating viral lift, designing content to be shared and mixing advertising, user-generated content and in-house content to maximum effect. The dude knows of what he speaks.