McDonald’s might just get it

So a few weeks ago, McDonald’s joined the legions of companies who’ve used user-generated content to create advertising campaigns. Sometimes, it’s a disaster because users submit videos making fun of your product and the company gets bad press for censoring those clips out. Sometimes, it’s a flop, because all the ads toe the company line but, for lack of a more technical term, suck: they aren’t funny, they’re badly produced etc. What’s a brand to do?

Along with a colleague, I wrote an article offering some advice on this subject last summer, but none of the user-generation attempts I’ve seen since have taken that advice to heart. The McDonalds contest, however, might reflect a change.

See, company judges just announced five finalists and oddly, one of them is a man who tried to job a Mickey D’s in his teenage years. According to TechCrunch, this is a sign that the idiots at McDonald’s don’t know to run a Google background check. But in fact, I think it’s a sign that McDonald’s understands Web 2.0 branding. People are saying things about you–good and bad–all over the Web anyway; so why not bring your “enemies” inside, where you can counter the attacks. Moreover, the ad in question isn’t critical of McDonald’s so it’s the company’s way of saying that even if you hated us at 14, you might come ’round. I gotta admit, I think it’s pretty coy.

Which Party is more tech savvy?

In most polls I see, Barack Obama is set to win in November, which suggests that he and the Dems are pretty tuned in to the national pulse. President Bush is unpopular, it’s a “change” election, and in an era of big technological transformations, the geriatric McCain admits he doesn’t use email. Barack is the hip, young, leader of tomorrow etc.

But then, I learn that the GOP is using Facebook to solicit policy ideas from voters. It’s a similar approach to Gordon Brown’s Ask the PM project, which I blogged about in May: issue-oriented brandbuilding, rather than the plea for donations that characterizes most online politicking.

So I’m split–any thoughts on which party actually gets the Web 2.0 universe? And how important is an understanding of these technologies to lead a 21st century society?

Free Culture 2.0?

So I’m not a believer in all that free culture anarchism, at least not the way it was articulated in the mid-1990s as some kind of communitarian alternative to the capitalist economy. Artists were supposed to produce for the joy of it, and do something else (teach, sell coffee) to pay the rent. Art for money was not art. Writing licensed computer code for Microsoft was sinful. Etc.

The result is the old record companies arguing for REGULATING the internet as the capitalism-friendly model (which is weird, given all that stuff I learned in econ class about free markets…) and the artists/college students protesting for “free culture as both free from regulation and cost-free.

But now digital media has become mainstream, rather than a geek toy, and the 1990s GenX radicals have given way to GenY entrepreneurs. Artists are finally coming forward to say that free access to the Internet as a technology is and should be compatible with maintaining ownership and rights to content: artists need to make a buck from their work, but they can’t do that if they can’t get to market, and the Internet is now the market, not the product.

That’s the idea behind a new CD that brings mainstream artists (ex: Wilco, on the Warner Music Group’s Nonesuch label) with independents (ex: Aimee Mann) to raise money and awareness for this new middle ground, called “Net Neutrality.” The record, from indie label Thirsty Ear, is out on July 29, and the big surprise is a new song (I kid you not) from the Wrens!

Meanwhile last.fm is moving from free downloads to a model that remunerates artists for their work. AND the Internet Freedom Preservation Act, the proposed revision to the Digital Millenium Copyright Act of 1998, is back in circulation on the Hill.

Together, those three incidents tell me that the old binary might be breaking down.

Pixar Nails It, Again

I saw WALL-E last night and completely fell in love. There are many film critics better qualified than I to wax eloquent about the animation and the soundtrack. But what got me about the film was its approach to technology and industrialization.

To summarize, WALL-E lives on an Earth that is so covered with litter that it can’t sustain human life. His job is to clean up while the humans orbit the Earth in a space-station cum shopping mall and become fatter and lazier as they continue to buy, and throw away, more junk. But WALL-E also picks through the litter before he runs it through his compressor. He saves relics of human civilization that appeal to his sentimental side: tapes of “Hello, Dolly!,” a rubiks cube, a spork, some Twinkies for his pet cockroach, Christmas lights etc. All of these are the outgrowth, in one way or another, of the same technological and commercial trajectory that produced the mess WALL-E cleans. So, for that matter, is WALL-E.

In our current debates about globalization or climate change, we often talk as though there are two sides: humanitarian, environmentalist lefties who oppose technology and right-wing libertarians who believe it can do no wrong. Meanwhile debates about copyright or social media privacy controls often pit free culture radicals (who believe the Internet SHOULD be allowed to do everything it CAN do) against an old media establishment (who believe, the story goes, that the Internet should be allowed to do as little as possible).

WALL-E is a film that points out the middle ground in these binaries. Just because industrialization can pollute does not mean pollution is its necessary outcome. Nor does that destructive potential compel us to abandon its positive abilites, like making the computers that give us digital animation. Just because the Internet allows us to see everyone’s personal information and steal company secrets does not make those practices okay. Nor do the dangers of the digital world mean we ought to give up the convenience of the Google search.

Fitting, then, that WALL-E comes from Pixar, and thus from Steve Jobs, a titan of the digital age.

Nice Try, Google

Google thinks they’ve struck gold with a new scheme to monetize online video. They’ve hired Family Guy’s Seth McFarlane to produce some short (1-2 minute) webisodes of a new series to run on their AdSense network. Advertisers can run their schtick in the intro to each episode.

Tapping the Family Guy viewers is a good call, and going for short videos, rather than TV-show length episodes, makes sense for the web audience, used to two paragraph blog posts and 140 word tweets. But as an ad project, this will fail. Within weeks, I predict, viewers will be downloading the webisodes, stripping out the ad portion and uploading them to YouTube!, just like they do with ordinary TV shows today. In fact, the best web-video ad-ventures involve putting adverts onto YouTube! as content, a la Dove Evolution.

Not sure if every brand can opt for that approach, but I’ve yet to see another feasible pathway.

Bye, Bye Bill

It’s the end of an era. Bill Gates is leaving Microsoft to be a full-time dogooder. Over at TechCrunch, there’s an interesting discussion about who might replace him as the individual who “controls” the tech world. For almost two decades, Gates and Microsoft have had enough of a hold on computing that whatever you built or designed at least had to work WITH Windows. Even Apple caved.

But according to TechCrunch, nobody “controls” today’s platform–the Web. So no one can ever do what Gates did again.

Puhl-eese. It’s true that neither Facebook nor Google nor Yahoo can become the one-and-only platform for everything (they’re all trying to do that, but I think Web 2.0 consumers like having multiple foci for their internet lives, so the titans will have to coexist).

But that doesn’t mean that there isn’t an entrepreneur out there who gets to be the chief change driver. The thing is, with today’s set of tech leaders that sell consumer experiences as much or more than they sell technological gadgetry, the leader need not devise a platform or a set of code that everyone has to use and work with. Rather the next Bill Gates will be the person who devises a culture, a way of connecting to consumers, that everyone has to use, no matter what they sell.

TechCrunch’s poll is still valuable, and I encourage you to read it. But by asking who’s making the most/best STUFF for the web, I’m not sure they’re thinking about the question the right way.

Convergence at Euro2008

So Germany eked out Turkey in today’s semi-finals. For me, that’s a good day. It was a high-pressure game, where no team had the lead for more than 10 minutes. But the main tension for me was that the TV feed kept dying at crucial moments, and I had to find alternative sources of play-by-play information.

I turned to ESPN’s live commentary, but since the commentators are in a newsroom watching the game on TV too, they were in the same boat at first. Then one of the commentators decided to go in search of a radio, to find a station with live broadcast from Basel. Most of us don’t have radios in our office cubicles, but the ESPN team started transcribing the radio commentary onto their website. A minute or two behind the game, yes, but play-by-play nonetheless.

Turns out the Internet’s not gonna eliminate other technologies, because sometimes it needs old-school partners to help it out.

Ask Hu?

Last month, I blogged about Gordon Brown’s attempt to connect with young, hip voters through an interactive video Q&A; on YouTube. Apparently, this is a new trend, because China’s Premier Hu Jintao is taking a similar tack on people.com this week. Wonder when I’ll get to ask George Bush my questions…I have a pretty long list, you know.

How the Other Half Thinks

I’ve been blogging a lot lately about the effects of digital news outlets on the print world, trying to identify the best and worst practices for confronting change. This weekend, at a conference of South Asian journalists, I attended a fascinating panel about blogs run by print organizations and written by beat reporters to “augment” their day job.

The speakers, Sewell Chan and Jennifer Lee from the New York Times, and Mark Seibel from McClatchy’s, each began with some general remarks on what makes a good blog and how blog posts might be different in content and style from a news story. Some of it was old news to those of us in the room who were bloggers already, but I’d certainly never seen such a methodical breakdown of what it is blogs do.

Blogs are good places for reporters to
–dump nuggets that didn’t make the final print cut
–keep up with a news story that is moving faster than the daily news cycle
–air opinions/debate contraversies that would be “unjournalistic” in print
–go deep into “color” items like community anecdotes, historical factoids or reader polls that wouldn’t be “news” items on their own
–do “spinach” stories, the social justice-type pieces that aren’t always sexy, but need attention to advance a cause

As at most conferences, the real show was the Q&A session, where I got an inside look into the business side of the print-blog equation. Pressed by the audience, Chan, Lee and Seibel spoke as editors and managers about the effect of blogs on a macro-scale, beyond the content of individual stories.

All the speakers reiterated the old cliché that Web 2.0 explodes the linear structure of print news (front to back) so that every website has infinite entry points. You might reach a story from a newspaper’s homepage, but you might also link directly to the story from a blog, a Wikipedia entry or an email from a friend. Seibel took this a step further–if readers (87% in fact) don’t come to McClatchy’s blog posts through McClatchy’s, then something has to happen on the blog page to connect them to the brand. McClatchy’s has therefore redesigned not only every blog, but every story page, to include more links back to the home page. Smart call. Also smart is the way McClatchy’s blogs are all centralized on the company’s website, allowing them to build some sort of national/international news brand that complements the local nature of their many print newspapers.

The other major flashpoint was the question of copyright, especially given the recent tension between the AP and the Drudge Retort. Recognizing that most readers come to their blogs and stories through links from other websites, all three speakers were surprisingly lax about copyright regulations. Chan said the NYTimes does not police the internet too aggressively in search of those who copy and reuse its content. Seibel quipped that his company has only gone so far as to trademark its own name. Today’s readers, he added, are less loyal to one news organization brand. rather we might Google-search a subject and link to stories on that, sometimes arriving at an NYTimes or a McClatchy’s on the six or seventh click. Given that indirect path, no one journalist claims complete credit for giving a reader the 600 word article at the end of such a chain–copyright starts to unravel.

Some of the blog coverage of the AP fiasco tends to paint a picture of forward looking new media assaulting an old media establishment that is resentful of and hostile to change. I’ve always questioned that picture, but this panel confirmed that at the top of the print food chain, where the power’s at, blogs are viewed with excitement and admiration. As Seibel said, “I now find blogs more interesting than stories because [bloggers] tell what they know, without feeling compelled to balance all view points and get so many expert opinions that they end up not saying anything definitive.”

Indeed, there’s a lot more bitterness and resentment coming from some bloggers these days than I heard yesterday.

Too Much of a Good Thing

Whenever there’s a newfangled trend on the scene, the soothsayers are quick to decide it’s going to get out of hand and take over the world. Women’s suffrage had men worrying about domestic anarchy. Same-sex marriage has crazy cultural conservatives predicting the legalization of bestiality. TV had George Orwell all worried about Big Brother surveillance. And the first computers had a lot of sci-fi writers predicting the age of robots.

That’s not really how change works, of course. When Thomas Edison invented electricity, and offered to help Congress tally votes faster with an electric ballot box, they said no. Counting by hand gives them more time to schmooze, and schmoozing is essential to politics. TV didn’t kill radio, because for some things (like driving long distances) radio is still useful. And just because we CAN use computers and the Internet all the time, doesn’t mean we want to. Sometimes, the old-fashioned way is best.

Two stories today suggest I’m right about this. First, companies are finally starting to see that constant web access, first hailed as a productivity aid, is a problem if it means we’re all IM-ing our friends from work, or doing things piecemeal in little emails instead of actually having meetings. Second, university profs have figured out that Microsoft Word is great for notetaking, but students using laptops to play Minesweeper in class is not so useful. So the companies and the profs are experimenting with ways to regulate technology and channel it in exclusively positive directions.

Which means the soothsayers should calm down: Pens, paper and conference halls are not going anywhere as yet.