JG etc.

It has been a little over a year since I moved to New York(yikes!) and I am excited to head back to San Francisco in a few weeks for a concert that just makes sense. Outside Lands. A 3 day music and arts festival in Golden Gate Park.

The kicker to all of this is my company, Federated Media, will be hosting CrowdFire at the event. John Battelle has a great ode to the whole creation and concept of CrowdFire and how in many respects it is interwoven into the core of our business at FM. Embracing the digital world and it’s platform through the celebration of music at a very special park in San Francisco has a lot of people very excited.

Can’t wait to get some Bay Area activities in me after 12 months on the Alley Side; while using CrowdFire to connect with a whole bunch of folks at and around the event.

Noted: Big congrats to Stacey Foreman, Jonathan Schreiber, Jared Katzman, Matt Jessell, and the rest of the team for taking the concept and creating the event and site in such a short period of time.

A few months ago John Shankman created a campaign for RadioShack that I promised the readership a scoop of ChasNote around. Unfortunately this post never came to be. But here for you now is not only that interview, but also a preview into a new campaign. One that I think will continue to extend the Brand of Shankman and his dominance over the current shift that is occurring in media.

Tell me a little about the RadioShack campaign, what sets it apart?

The more general take away is that RadioShack added a lot of value in building out the Invention Lab platform in partnership with Makezine. It’s advertising that is interesting to the target audience. That DIY crowd and backyard scientist. It wasn’t so much about reach and frequency although the campaign did have a component that played to that; it was more about creating a really engaging and enjoyable experience for a large compilation of some of RadioShack’s most important customers.

Tell me about DeadSpin, I’m fascinated by your media consumption?

It introduced me to the blogosphere and, more broadly, independent digital media. This was back in 2004 and I was stuck at ESPN.com and Yahoo!, and this isn’t to say that those media properties aren’t valuable in their own right, but the day Bill Simmons linked to Deadspin forever changed my life. Blogdome (editors note: this is where Deadspin links to the day’s best sports blog posts) opened up a whole new world to me. I thought, “Really?! This exists?!” The amount of awesome content and communities that I found by following links from blog to blog was mind blowing.

The other component that made Deadspin a real, digital media success story is one word that I focus on when trying to create a valuable marketing program: community. The community at Deadspin is tremendous. Read through the comment threads and you will see real audience engagement: people commenting in the same thread mulitple times and true feelings of loyalty. Granted this had a lot to do with the wonderful community leadership and writing skills of Will Leitch who has since left Deadspin for greener pastures (http://nymag.com/nymag/9317/)multiple, but the point remains the same: Because of the communities online and the interactive nature of the digital medium, brands have a real opportunity to engage, and more importantly, support communities with their marketing programs. If brands do this in an interesting, transparent and valuable way like RadioShack did, then the brand will be rewarded with brand affinity and brand equity that lasts a lot longer than a flighted marketing campaign.

Speaking of sports…… Tell me about your new campaign.

It’s similar to the RS Invention Lab in the sense that its bringing to market something that the target audience will find interesting and valuable. Once you have that sort of wind at your back and you’ve found a scalable, quality and safe community for a world class brand like AOL, the rest is easy. Luckily, Federated Media represents SB*Nation which is an amazing community of sports bloggers and individual sports team blogs. AOL FanHouse recently acquired a great fantasy football platform called Fleaflicker that players can use as instead of Yahoo!, ESPN or CBS Sportsline to manage their fantasy football leagues. There are value-propositions that Fleaflicker offers, that their competitors can not, the problem was though how do we make the fantasy sports playing community at large aware of this in a way that will cut through all the other ad messaging out there? And so, Fan House Leagues was born. I hope that the FanHouse community and SBNation community continue to use this brand asset to promote both of their brands for more than just this season. Helping to support a community like this goes so far in today’s marketplace.

What is next? What gets you excited?

Opportunities with brands. I love working with my passions. Premium content a.k.a. watching good television is coming online. I love the distribution opportunities that digital media offers this premium content. It becomes a matter of matching up a great value proposition with consumers that are interested in this type of content. These opportunities seem to be getting richer and richer by the day.

What do you see your self doing in 2 years?

Media mogul? Working in a French vineyard? I don’t know what I’m doing tonight, let alone in two years. Seriously, I imagine I’ll still be at FM.

If you could give brands one piece of advice for marketing online, what would it be?

Communitize your brand. Make sure you are engaging and supporting the communities that contain your customers in a valuable and transparent way.

Good piece by Nik Cubrilovic on the New Apple Walled Garden.

The solution is simple. If you truly believe in open standards, open source and the good that it has created, then don’t accept it. The spirit of open source was about building on the work of others in a transparent fashion, as the gains further the common good of all. Despite not taking over the desktop market, the philosophy and its resultants have destroyed the old enterprise market and many others. Open source and standards keep Microsoft and other big companies on their toes, the movement as a whole and the philosophy is very real. The solution isn’t to adopt new licenses to try and prevent this, as it results in the mess that is GPL v 3.

It should be very possible to attach a simple BSD license to code, and if a large company utilizes the effort from others in a way that is unacceptable - the market should be able to sort that out, we simply wont buy it. The community needs to do more than just wear their support for openess and standards on their sleeves (and on their laptops). The problem with Apple is that the blind demand is driven by a distorted reality, so those same developers who poured thousands of hours into the BSD kernel now turn around and purchase an iPhone running that code, but it is now tied up in DRM, licenses and restrictions placed there by others.

That “blind demand” is driven by a company that is built from head to toe in marketing. So good, in fact, that the smartest guys in the room get sucked in.

–> The NY Times article for creating habitual demand for products got the wheels spinning this weekend. The CPG companies are awesome at this to a point of scariness. I’m not even sure how I feel about the FeBreeze example and I’m surprised how forth coming the P&G team was around giving up that type of information.

Begs the question, what brands online are doing this? Well, the best ones, are the ones that make their products and services online utilities. Use the bathroom, wash my hands with Dove soap. Can’t remember something, grab Blackberry, query Google.

–> With Summize search I’m having a lot of fun tracking certain memes. But what about “ranking” conversational search? Seems like TinyURL has the keys to this database. Interesting to see how that will play out over time. Update: Marshall Kirkpatrick might have answered my question with this post.

–> Conversational Media was on full display this weekend. I’m just as much of an Apple fan boy as the rest of them, but this weekend left me shaking my head. Conversational Media is at the steering wheel of creating demand for your brand; mass media and consumer thoughts are just buckled in for the ride. Michael Mace has some good thoughts on this here.

The age old correspondence of how do people, in this case children, have time to do that? Generally in response to things rich, amazing web apps like Graffiti on Facebook, Wikipedia, etc. Riffing off Clay Shirky’s piece.

Children and Computers from The Media Lab(Stewart Brand, 1988)

“Kids like computers… I think it corresponds to children wanting to control an important part of the world… They can feel the flexibility of the computer and its power. They can find a rich intellectual activity with which to fall in love. It’s through these intellectual love affairs that people acquire a taste for rigor and creativity….. There is a low threshold and no ceiling……. From the very start they are programming the computer rather than being programmed by it.”

Got into a good conversation today around thinking about the power of wordpress.com and the potential for tying together as a loosely inter-connected CMS that could be comparable to Yahoo! in the new era of the net.

I’m always fascinated by a property like Yahoo and their millions of uniques. This sheer scale coupled with their ability to literally push people around the net is awesome and in many ways, may never happen again, at least in terms of having a gold rush of users at your disposal.

I think what Matt and team over on the .com side of wordpress have an incredible opportunity to create a property similar to Yahoo! in scale while also having a certain amount of “portal effect” over their user base. Combine that with some intelligent data gathering, identity/networking, and open API’s and in many ways you have what the next version of Yahoo will be. The potential here is far larger than Ning or Facebook because of the domain level of integration and community. This would be the new killer app similar to what email was for Yahoo.

On a more local level, I think what Tumblr is doing in the NYC scene is pretty fascinating.