Friday's Video Views

Tweet

The Mother of All iPad 2 Reviews...Not

With speculation and counter-speculation running rampant in advance of the now-confirmed Apple presser on March 2 to intro the iPad 2, The Next Web treats us to an early review of the best-selling product line...sort of. Apple watchers apparently liked this video judging from its 1.2MM+ views so far.




The Taste and Feel of Media's Future

IN a follow-up to my post earlier this week, here's is Chris Brogan's video take on media future. The digital pundit also added his comments on that earlier post.




Curating Twitter w/ Paper.li

I often see my tweets pop in daily online journals using the automated Paper.li platform. Here's a tutorial on just how that happens via Donna Papacosta of Trafalgar Communications of Toronto. (Psst. This blog is manually assembled.)




Jimmy Fallon Mobilizes

Big news this week in NYC, as twopogated by New York's new digital doyenne Rachel Sterne: the city will be adding QR codes to all sorts of New York venues, ostensibly to let tourists be a little less lost. Zach Seward picked up on the news in the Journal's Metropolis section. Since I work with a pioneer in the "print-to-mobile" space, I was glad to see the use of the "mobile action codes," as we call them, gain more traction. (Remember QR codes are just one of a number of these codes, albeit one that is quickly becoming the de facto name for the category). Anyway, Jimmy Falon now has the distinction as the first talk show host to deploy a QR Code on the air. Here's a clip via Hypebot.com




AP Shooters Prefer

I remember the days running film rolls over to the AP photo department (at 50 Rock) following a news event, and waiting around to see if the picture editor would choose any images to move. If so, we were tasked with crafting a caption, and, if we were really behaved, the picture editor would print out a tear sheet of the image with the AP dateline and our caption for us to leave with. Now, of course, everything is handled wirelessly. What hasn't changed is the quality and price of the cameras with which the AP arms its photographers. It seems those top-of-the-line 35mm SLRs of yesteryear cost the same as some of the best DSLRs today. Here's a look at one digital SLR that's become the camera of choice for AP shooters, but not just for stills. Beet.TV talks with the AP Broadcast's Kevin Roach.




Press Release Fluff?

As if PR types didn't endure enough negative scrutiny, along comes an app from the UK that can decipher whether news is fluff or not. The Guardian reports: "A new website promises to shine a spotlight on "churnalism" by exposing the extent to which news articles have been directly copied from press releases." Churnalism was developed by an org called Media Standards Trust. Paste your questionable PR text here. Martin Moore explains.

What Becomes An Influencer Most?

Tweet

The other day, a newspaper reporter posted an item on ProfNet (or was it HARO?) seeking experts on how best to identify online "influencers" on any given topic. The reporter seemed mostly focused on the much buzzed about Klout and how well its algorithm scored such influencers.

I dropped the inquisitor a note saying that I wasn't a huge fan of Klout, in spite of having a reasonably respectable score myself. Maybe it had to do with a Klout meetup I attended in NYC last summer where one of the site's principals was less than friendly. (Think dot-com CEO.)

Whatever the case, the reporter's query also sought online resources for identifying influencers by subject area. Sawhorse Media's Listorious naturally came first to mind, and then there's Kevin Rose's WeFollow in which anyone can register and add a profile. Finally, there's PeerIndex, a much less robust Klout competitor. I'm sure there are others.

I sent these along and also suggested that our ratio of Twitter followers to friends (those we're following) may also in some way play a factor in assessing influence, i.e., Kim Kardashian has 650K+ followers and only follows 126 people.

Not unexpectedly, the quants in the valley decided to examine the notion of influence, but from the perpective of what makes a Twitter trend. In their study titled "Trends in Social Media: Persistence and Decay" for which they examined 16 million tweets over 40 days last fall, a handful of scientists empirically proved the following:

"We also demonstrate empirically how factors such as user activity and number of followers do not contribute strongly to trend creation and its propagation. In fact, we find that the resonance of the content with the users of the social network plays a major role in causing trends."

Resonance, huh? One digital influencer summarized the report in a post last week. The Times's "Bits" blogger Nick Bilton glommed onto this element of the HP Labs study:

"Instead, the researchers found that the mainstream media, including organizations like The New York Times, CNN and BBC, act as “feeders” for news topics, helping to amplify and in turn make something into a trend on the social network."

This study is not insignificant for those of us PR types charged with identifying and engaging "influencers" -- journalists among them -- for our client's products, services and POVs. Mark Leccese, writing for Boston.com's "Gatekeeper" blog, weighed in via a post on Monday in which he ended with an unqualified endorsement of traditional media and its ability to set Twitter tongues-a-waggin.

"But the most rewteeted, and thus influential, posts on Twitter originate with the reporters and editor of traditional media. It makes sense. Who else the information-gathering resources and news-presentation resources traditional media has? Even as new communications technologies — blogs, Facebook, Twitter, the torrent of social media sites — offer new ways to disseminate information, the backbone of news-gathering and reporting remains (and is the really a surprise?) traditional media."

Duly noted. I'm not undermining the influence of the more popular (resonant?) blogs like Politico, HuffPost, TechCrunch, Gothamist, Gawker, and a myriad others, but for now, those stalwart journalistic enterprises (of which a few are cited above) continue to serve as primary conversation catalysts.

Media & Journalism

Tweet

(Via Politico)

A-list blogger and digital thought leader Chris Brogan took the long President's Day weekend to pen a post titled "The Future of Media."

Being one of his nearly 175K followers on Twitter, I was drawn to the post based on a single tweet of his. (Don't believe the notion that Twitter is killing the blogosphere. Twitter fuels blogs! IMHO)

Anyway, I expected to hear Chris talk about two of the more common themes covered by today's myriad media pundits: the fragmentation of media and the demise of the mainstream media's stalwart flagbearers -- newspapers, broadcast TV news and news magazines.

Chris Brogan (photo: Rick Turoczy via Wylio)

Instead, Chris chose to look at how media will look, feel and behave for the increasingly broadband-wired and wireless consumer of news and information.

He cleverly boils down the future of media to seven ideas captured by phrases like "multi-touch," "mobile," "serial," "two-way," "rich data minded," "subscription-based" and "longer burn." (He knows that the better blogs keep it simple and a little video helps too.)

I too have given some thought on the future of media, but less from the perspective of what media will taste and look like in the future and more about its role in a democratic society. Hence, I was surprised (though hardly disappointed) by Chris's approach to forecasting the future of a medium. Maybe it's not "media" on which I've been dwelling, but the future of journalism that has given me pause.

I recently penned a post on Huffington Post's new m̶e̶d̶i̶a̶ ̶ journalism model in which original reporting is combined with linked content from other sources, original content from (unpaid) third-party experts, and paid (sponsored) content from credible enterprises like IBM and GE. (Forbes also has supplemented its original content with "sponsored" content.) And, as Chris noted, let's not overlook consumer-generated content in the form of comments.

Peter Himler w/ Emily Bell

It is through this lens, versus one that focuses on context, that merits considerable more scrutiny. Sitting beside me on a recent panel on the future of science news reporting was the very smart and articulate Emily Bell who heads Columbia J School's Tow Center for Digital Journalism.

When I expressed concern over the loss of the powerful check&balance the mass media once had over unscrupulous politicians, multi-national corporations, and advocacy groups, she was less fazed by it. She seemed to say that new and growing voices in an increasingly pluralistic (i.e., splintered) media world will gain in influence to serve this function. (She described it as a meritocracy.")

Why then am I still so concerned? Why can't HuffPost grow faster in reach and influence to effectively end these misdeads? I watch how politicians like the new Governor of Wisconsin impose his radical (special interest-fueled) agenda on the people of his state with impunity -- something a once-powerful Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel (now JS Online) had the muscle to sway large, influential swaths of public opinion only five years ago.

It's not just that the number and demographics of the Journal-Sentinel's readers have changed, but the ephemeral nature of news -- today delivered via Twitter bursts. Misdeeds simply don't trend for very long. Or do they? Here's a clip with NPR's Andy Carvin who almost singlehandedly is curating the revolutions in the Middle East (for which this blogger nominated him for a Shorty Award).

So, yes, Chris, I'm totally psyched by the prospect of how broadband will more readily fill my "media" appetite with more engaging, enlightening and interactive content. But I'm also concerned about how a once-powerful "fourth estate" has been sidelined when it comes to righting societal wrongs - even as Politico, HuffPost and...Twitter slowly gain in influence and effect.

Friday's Video Views

Tweet

Mapnificent

For those who've attended a reasonable share of start-up showcase events -- from the left coast's (soon to be east coast) TechCrunch Disrupt and its nemesis Launch, to the city's NY Tech Meet-up and Ultra Light Startups - you've no doubt witnesses a rash of aspiring companies in the urban transport space. In fact, there's a conference skedded here called Transportation Camp focused solely on this burgeoning area. One app that recently crossed my desktop allows anyone -- without wheels -- to quickly determine the travel time within a metro-enabled city, in this case, San Francisco.


Mapnificent from Stefan Wehrmeyer on Vimeo.


A Touch of Reality

As if Cisco's Telepresence wasn't adequate, some smarty Dutchmen at the University of Groningen have taken it to the next level with their "Reality Touch Screen," admittedly not as business practical as Telepresence.



He Definitely Diggs This

DIGG founder Kevin Rose tweeted his pleasure in seeing his creation mentioned in HP's new national TV campaign.




4SQ & Virgin Mobile

Not to be outdone, Foursquare's Dennis Crowley no doubt enjoyed seeing his creation mentioned in the Virgin Mobile TV spot. His tweet read: "Check out good 'ol @foursquare getting some love in this @VirginMobileUS TV ad!"




Crowley's Ubiquity

For the mobile-minded who didn't make it to Bar-the-lona this week for the Mobile World Congress, Ad Age's event maven David Teicher tweets our attention to AllThingsD's mobile maven Ina Fried's check-in with the omnipresent Dennis Crowley.




That CNN Beast Kurtz & the AOL-HuffPost Hook-Up

Not unexpectedly, CNN and The Daily Beast's resident media critic Howie Kurtz took to his reliable sources to get the inside skinny on the bofo deal. Frankly, I'd like to know his boss The Tina Beast's take.




Mubarak Resigns Though Twitter's Eyes

This is a network analysis of an hour's worth of tweets emanating from Egypt, each one containing the hastags #jan25 and #egypt from hundreds of people who came together over an hour in the wake of Mubarak's resignation. (via @ITSinsider)




Samsung Galaxy Buzz

HuffPost's (new sister site Engadget) threw some love Samsung's way for its Galaxy Tab netbook. Is iPad quaking? Doubtful, but the Tab is getting some high marks.




Worst Facebook Profile Pics Ever

(Need I say more?)

Apple's Secret PR Sauce

Tweet

An Australian economics professor professes to know the secret PR sauce that led to the "implausible" disappearance of Apple's biggest crisis in recent years: "AntennaGate." Surely you remember the hyperbolic iPhone 4 launch and the ensuing issues from a misbehaving antenna. (Thank goodness for duct tape.)

In a fresh re-hash of the incident in Harvard Business Review (from a PR lens),  Joshua Gans claims that Apple purposely ignored "5 key rules ingrained in the public relations playbook" when it addressed this mini-turned-maxi crisis.


"Jobs & co. did none of these — and that is why he succeeded in capturing the higher ground:"

• Apologize and take full responsibility.

• Don't create expectations with a media event.

• Announce the give away first.

• Avoid specific comparisons with competitors.

• Don't air your industry's dark secrets.

Prof. Gans concludes his thesis by saying:

"Apple broke all five rules in their management of AntennaGate — indeed, they broke a sixth and actually referred to the issue as "AntennaGate" — and drew the ire of public relations experts. Their handling of the situation worked. The same option was available to any of its competitors and none of them seized the opportunity. They now look like fools. While I'd like to say that Apple's response to AntennaGate changed public relations forever, BP's handling of the oil spill just a few weeks later tells us that wasn't the case."

As someone who's actually practiced PR and crisis management, I'm not sure what playbook these plays are coming from, but, IMHO, the two factors that led to the quick resolution of this unforeseen crisis are missing from the above list.

First, Apple and its CEO spent years building a well of "reputation capital" from which it could (and did) draw when faced with tough times. Also, Mr. Jobs came off looking earnest in his rigorous defense of his most esteemed product, albeit admittedly without all the facts in hand. (When he finally did have the facts, the Apple engineer responsible for the screw-up got shit-canned.)

The second, and probably bigger factor that led to the relatively quick erasure of this incident from the collective public consciousness has to do with the 24/7 news cycle and a short-memoried public. In a crisis, and especially in today's relentless media environment, the passage of time is the greatest heeler of all.

Even the perpetrators of the biggest crisis of our generation -- BP -- has recouped much of its lost stock price since the oil spill, and today is back to business as usual with that egregious catastrophe mostly faded in the public's rear view mirror.

Still, I enjoyed reading Prof. Gans's Monday morning assessment of how Apple handled this rare product (versus health) crisis in its midst. I just don't buy into the notion that the PR decisions made during those frenzied days were made with as much forethought as the professor insinuates. Apple PR is smart...just not that smart.

New York's New Social Scene

Tweet

For those fixated on Egypt last week -- either via Andy Carvin's curatorial efforts on Twitter or via a resurgent CNN or re-cast Al Jazeera -- the City of New York and eight others played host to literally hundreds of interactive sessions, panels and keynotes celebrating how social media has come to permeate all aspects of our lives. (Though I admit my boomer friends in our leafy NY suburb remain clueless.)

Some stats: "Globally, there were over 25,000 physical attendees across all nine of our cities attending over 600 individual sessions that comprised over 1800 speakers. Additionally, over 80,000 unique visitors participated online through our livestream channels and more than 180,000 unique visitors came through socialmediaweek.org leading up to and during the conference."

Hearst's David Carey

SMW founder Toby Daniels

4SQ co-founder Naveen Selvadurai

I was fortunate to have played an advisory role for the New York leg of the SM feast where 150+ events took place, including a session over which I presided on the future of science news reporting. Client commitments prevented me from attending a number of the day-time sessions, though I did check out some evening events.

Nokia Real-Time Tweet Map

Here are some random observations and images from my travels last week. It started with a presser in the Hearst Tower featuring Hearst prexy David Carey, Social Media Week founder Toby Daniels, FourSquare co-founder Naveen Selvadurai and a NYC EDC executive. In addition to the plaudits and platitudes, attendees got a glimpse of sponsor Nokia's global tweet map that reflected in real-time those hash tag-fueled 140-character musings from SM revelers in the nine participating cities.

PR Newser's Tonya & (Buddy) Joe

NYPL's Celeste Bartos Forum

Toby and Ben

Cassel & Friend

Steve and Sola

Monday night's opening party took place in a fabulously opulent space in NYPL's Celeste Bartos Forum that seemed incongruent with the attendee's youthful demo. (I presume most had not previously visited the New York Public Library before that evening?) In either case, it was great event to which I brought my wife in an effort to acclimate her to geek culture before our trip to Austin next month.

Peter, Shayndi & Chaim

Lizzy, Rob & Constantin

Ellie & Brian

Mashable fifth "NextUp NYC" at the TribecaY focused on "the skills that news organizations will demand and the tools journalists will need to be successful as they redefine the way they report, produce and distribute their content."

Mashable's Adam Ostrow

Moderated by Mashable's community manager/social media strategist Vadim Lavrusik, the panel featured NYU's Jay Rosen, NYTimes's Jenna Wortham, D: All Things Digital/The Wall Street Journal Digital's Drake Martinet, and CNN's Laurie Segall.

Drake, Jenna, Jay, Laurie & Vadim

Each of the panelists had different levels of sophistication, but I enjoyed learning of a couple of cool tools from moderator Lavrusik, including Rapportive, which allows one to see location and profile data of incoming emailers in GMail watch out PR peeps!), and TweetedTimes, which aggregates your tweets into an online newspaper format (Paper.li for the Twitter set?).

Sysomos Analysis of SMW Conversation

On Wednesday, the SMW blog posted an analysis of the global conversation about the week-long event. (Not unexpectedly, Twitter was the dominant platform). Here's the breakout (courtesy of Sysomos).

The next evening Graham Lawlor, founder of Ultra Light Start-ups, held his monthly gathering for aspiring techno-preneurs at NYU's Tisch Auditorium. The evening opened with a series of one-minute elevator pitches on stage before a crowd of a few hundred spectators looking for the next big thing. Talk about pressure! Even the NY Tech meetups allow its presenters five minutes to extol their wares.

Nonetheless, the format worked and the presenters met the challenge of presenting, not to mention some tough questions from the audience, the most popular of which was: "so how do you intend to make money?" Following the ulta-light start-up presos, Graham convened a panel titled "Engineering Viral Media," a concept in which more than a few in my social spheres have a compelling interest.

Ultra Light Start-Ups @ NYU Tisch Auditorium

The panel featured Greg Galant, CEO of Sawhorse Media, Adam Pennenberg, Professor of Journalism at NYU, Author of Viral Loop, Jonah Peretti, Co-Founder of BuzzFeed and Huffington Post, Michael Yavonditte, Founder & CEO of Hashable and Tracked.com. Graham promises to post the video at some point. (I had to bug out to prep for my session the next day.)

Thursday arrived and thank goodness the sun was shining since two of our science panelists were flying in from Washington DC and Rochester, respectively. In researching the topic, I came across at least three significant conferences over the last two years on the same subject: the decimated science news hole and reporting staffs at mainstream media.

The conferences from two years ago were so morose with this CNN reporter or that NPR reporter lamenting the decline in their ranks. Nearly all painted a doomsday scenario for science literacy in this nation, and a win for forces questioning global warming, evolution and the need for alternative energy solutions.

Chemistry: Himler, Bell, Leonard, Lloyd, Van Pay @ Edelman

Flash forward to our session last week where Scientific America's Robin Lloyd, NSF's Lisa Van Pay, Futurity.org's Jenny Leonard, and the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia's Emily Bell painted a much more hopeful scenario. Our panel was held in the fab PH at Edelman's still new and open offices in Tribeca. (Definitely beats Times Square's cookie cutter space.)

All seemed to agree that the state of science journalism is undergoing a renaissance right now with "nearly 4000" blogs devoted exclusively to reporting science news. Still, I argued, that we still need a strong voice in mainstream, mass audience-reaching media to balance sometimes nefarious private interests, which today have the capacity to create and syndicate directly to the public self-interested (and sometimes dubious) content. I kinda longed for the days when The NYTimes could unilaterally set the national news agenda.

Emily Bell quickly shut me down. We live in a media ecosystem of Darwinian proportions. It's more of a media "meritocracy," Bell said, wherein the higher the quality of reporting, the greater the eventual reach and authority of the publication. This is clearly a good thing. Robin Lloyd of Sci-Am agreed. Readers definitely weigh the source in evaluating the acuity of the content.

District 36

Step & Repeat

The week ended with a big, loud closing night bash at a club called District 36. My wife's and my presence elevated the media age by a couple of years, but that's OK.

McCallum, who knew?

Those green fluorescent wristbands gave us entry to the VIP room where we made friends with Alicia and Carly from JWT, Sola from BTO who planned the Google Hub, and others. I was tempted to chat up 4SQ's Dennis Crowley standing nearby, but lost my badge of courage.

Cool Rims

JWT's Gemma & VZ's Michelle

Congratulations again to Toby Daniels and his team at Crowdcentric for pulling off a most impressive and auspicious week here and in eight other cities.





Photos: Peter Himler, Canon SX20 IS

Friday's Video Views

Tweet

Astroturf Birth

I'm convinced that advertising creatives have different sensibilities than their counterparts in PR. For the former, the ends justify the means, even if one has to stretch the boundaries of taste or veracity. In my last post, I wrote about Crispin Porter's Super Bowl spots for Groupon. As you know by now, many people groused about the creative license Crispin took with some political hot buttons, namely the plight of Tibetans, for one.

So much so that the CEO of Crispin's parent company went on CNBC to assuage the situation, but also talk about the success the spots had in attracting new registration.

"They have over 50,000 new customers that have come on board since the ad ran, so its actually drawing the kind of business performance that we expected it to," Nadal said.

"You have to understand there is a difference between popularity and business effectiveness," Nadal said, adding, "strategically Groupon has always dealt with social issues from the very evolution of the business."

A smart PR person on the other hand might have anticipated the negative backlash and advised to proceed more cautiously. Frankly, I'm torn. In an age where the boundaries of bad taste are endless -- thank you GoDaddy -- maybe there's a happy compromise to be had. It's all about the results, right? Update: Maybe not. Groupon pulled the spots today.

The following video tells the back story of a campaign from another ad agency, this one in Germany. The campaign featured an image of a woman giving birth on a city street. The enduring image went global and viral quickly. We now learn that image was staged in an astro-turfed effort to mark the birth of the agency. But who knew it at the time? Again, ad peeps seem to hold full-disclosure in low regard, as compared to their brethren on the other side of the marketing aisle.




Mashable's New Social Layer

On the day of AOL's boffo acquisition of the Huffington Post, Mashable founder Pete Cashmore put out an intriguing tweet to his 14,000+ followers. It read in essence that Mashable has some big news it will announce the next day. Of course this raised lots of speculation among the media pundits who were predicting a raft of such website acquisitions stemming from the AOL news. The next day arrived, and alas, Mashable remained independent. The immensely popular and influential site did however unveil an invitation-only (at least initially) platform to give its users a more sociable and relevant content-focused experience. Mashable Follow was born. Here's the video clip that editor Adam Ostrow shared at the Mashable NextUp event the next evening at NYC's TribecaY.




INQ Cloud Touch

Back in September, Mark Zuckerberg opened the curtain for TechCrunch on its mobile strategy. This week, TechCrunch takes an exclusive look at the first "Facebook Phone" from INQ Mobile, a British start-up.




The UN Pays Twitter a Visit

UN Ambassador Susan Rice held a town hall at Twitter's San Francisco headquarters (before the company leaves town). It coincided with all the attention Twitter and Facebook garnered around the events unfolding in Eqypt. Thanks TechCrunch for posting.




Freud's Nephew and Tahrir Square

Watching the mass rallies of Egyptians in Tahrir Square all week, I thought the following video of Sigmund Freud's nephew Edward Bernays, the "father" of the PR industry who coined the term "public relations," might have some resonance. No one could have envisioned Twitter and Facebook during Bernays' time, but the psychology behind mass movements may still apply. (I still cringe when I hear the term "mass manipulation.")




Snow Blow

For those of us northeasteners, this relatable video comes from @fox25news in Boston. It speaks for itself. (Thanks @stevegarfield for tweeting our attention.) CLICK HERE to view.

Groupon in the Red Zone

Tweet

TV

HotJobs.com | Super Bowl Ads | SPIKE.com

The last time we visited with the monster of all local couponing sites, it had to do with the unorthodox way the company's founder deflected the obvious question from NBC Today's Matt Lauer. Groupon's Andrew Mason, in the wake of turning down $6 billion from Google, chose to obfuscate with some long, irrelevant pre-planned diatribe when asked about the widely reported offer.

Today, Mr. Mason and company have stirred the media waters again as a result of the company's first TV spots that bowed on the world's biggest advertising stage. More on that in a sec.

Having handled a fair share of PR campaigns for Super Bowl ads, including three years running for another start-up back in the day, I'm amazed by how much media time and space this one-time sidebar story commands today.

Back then, coverage was limited to a handful of the key ad beat and trade reporters, e.g., The Times's Stuart Elliott, AdWeek former longtime critic Barbara Lippert, AdAge former longtime critic (and now NPR "On the Media" co-host, auhtor, etc.) Bob Garfield, the AP's Skip Wollenberg, USA Today, and a bunch of others. Soon, the syndicated and cable entertainment shows ET, Access, CNN ShowBiz all got into the act, followed by the network evening news casts. Today, Super Bowl ad coverage is ubiquitous -- from the advance buzz and real-time armchair quarterbacking on Twitter to the morning-after polls run by what seems like every mainstream news, entertainment and pop culture site.

Back then, we made the spots available to journalists well in advance of the game to ensure they stand out from the clutter. Screw the element of surprise! Out goal was simple: get included in as many advance and post-event Super Bowl ad round-up stories as possible. All that incremental ink and airtime measurably accrued to brand awareness, which was (and is) the holy grail for any start-up.

Also in the early days, we were saddled with sending hard copies of tapes to these key ad reporters. I kind of remember Stuart having this Sony U-Matic tape player in the Times newsroom for his viewing (dis)pleasure. That soon changed with the advent of the Internet. If memory serves me well, we were the first agency to post our client's Super Bowl spots online -- again, for HotJobs -- and invite select journalists to come view them in advance of the game. This was a revelation for many, and made our jobs much easier.



Back to last night's winners and losers. Apparently, Crispin Porter, Groupon's newly hired agency that brought us all those fabled buzzworthy Burger King spots, didn't anticipate how much of a lightening rod the subject of Tibet would spark. Or maybe they did. In a game day blog post on its website, Groupon's CEO offered some context for his first Super Bowl spots:

"After a two-year holdout, we finally decided to run real television ads. In the past, we’ve depended mostly on word-of-mouth and limited our advertising to online search for a couple of reasons. For one, we don’t know if television ads are worth the money. More importantly, television ads are such a huge creative statement, and so hard to do well, that we were worried it’d be near impossible to find an ad agency that could make ads we’d be confident in airing."

He ended the post with a philanthropic element that perhaps was added to neutralize whatever controversy the offbeat ads would produce: "

"You can view the already aired commercials, as well as new ones as we release them, at SaveTheMoney.org . And if you’ve saved enough money for yourself and feel like saving something else, you can donate to mission-driven organizations that are doing great work for the causes featured in our PSA parodies. If you guys pony up, Groupon will contribute matching donations of up to $100,000 for three featured charities – Rainforest Action Network, buildOn, and the Tibet Fund — and Groupon credit of up to $100,000 for contributions made to Greenpeace."

Even so, Vanity Fair wrote in its round-up titled "Ten Super Bowl Ads That Everyone is Talking About:

"Our Take: The holy-shit moment of the night. A misfire. Groupon thought it would be fun to introduce itself to the wider world with a TV commercial that makes fun of Hollywood political correctness. But they went about it in the wrong way. Nobody dislikes Tibet, and liberals and conservatives alike would like to see it have its independence from China."

While MSNBC likened Groupon's effort to Kenneth Cole's, another subject of this blog, in its post titled "Groupon Super Bowl ads draw scorn: Some offended by ads that appear to make light of Tibet, rainforest:

"Groupon may have been one of the least-known companies to advertise on Super Bowl Sunday, but it’s getting a lion’s share of the day-after buzz. Too bad it’s for the wrong reason. The online deals site managed to attract the scorn of customers, brand experts and even some Chinese residents with a pair of ads that seemed to make light of the fraught political situation in Tibet and deforestation in Brazil. Both ads followed the same formula."

As Andrew noted in his pre-game blog post:

"This year, we realized that in spite of how much we’d grown, a ton of people still hadn’t heard of Groupon, so we decided to give in to our Napoleon complex and invade the rest of the world with a proper Super Bowl commercial."

Well, Andrew, Groupon is now properly implanted in the minds of consumers everywhere, for better or worse. Now you're wondering whether you should address the controversy or not. How about a contrived story from your childhood?

Friday's Video Views

Tweet

NBC News Digital Chief Speaks

"There are over a billion cameras floating around in people's pockets around the world." Beet.TV treats us to the perspective of Mark Lukasiewicz, VP for Specials and Digital, NBC News. Of course, this interview took place before the momentous events in Egypt this week, which showed, in spite of those billion cameras, how difficult it can be to report from some locations when the government is determined to clamp the stream.




NBC's Social Habits

While we're talking NBC, my favorite Beantown video man Steve Garfield captured some video with Julie DeTraglia, the (former peacock) network's VP of Strategic Digital Research. Lost Remote posted it. DeTraglia said NBC is paying attention to the social engagement that occurs during TV shows. (I should hope so.)




Yelp's Crib

For a new MTV Cribs-esque series that TechCrunch is apparently working on, we get a peek into Yelp's San Francisco office with company CEO and co-founder Jeremy Stoppelman.




Insta-fame

Instagram founder Kevin Systrom chatted with you know who about how he felt at the launch of his much buzzed-about company.




Your Personal Brand

Social Media Examiner caught up with Mari Smith, author of Facebook Marketing: An Hour a Day. She waxes on how to build your brand via social media. Separately, I had the pleasure of meeting Jessica Kleiman, VP, Public Relations, Hearst Magazines who's written a not-unrelated book titled Be Your Own Best Publicist. I suspect for many of you, it will be a most worthwhile read.


SME Blogworld 2010 Mari Smith from Michael A. Stelzner on Vimeo.


Zuck at 30 Rock

It was rumored for days in advance, but I still missed it live. (Does anyone watch their fave shows in their regular time slots anyway?) So here is Mark Zuckerberg's "surprise" visit to SNL last weekend...time shifted.






The Science of Social Media

Hub Spot's social media scientist Dan Zarrella at Harvard? Sure. It's an hour long, but if you want some insights into the science of social media, take a watch.


The Science of Social Media from HubSpot on Vimeo.


My Next Purchase

Thanks @nextweb for this light mac moment.

Unfashionable Tweet

Tweet

The Twitterstream is in an uproar today over a tweet from the once-famous designer shoemaker who married the new New York Governor's sister and now has a famous fashion empire. Here's the tweet that set Twitter tongues-a-waggin:

@KennethCole Millions are in uproar in #Cairo. Rumor is they heard our new spring collection is now available online at http://bit.ly/KCairo -KC

These 140 characters not only turned the Twittersphere against this famous person and brand, but it spawned the birth of the @BPGlobalPR-inspired Twitter persona @KennethColePR, with its 650+ followers (and rising with a bullet). Here are some of the choice tweets emanating from the faux Cole feed:

@KennethColePR Ben Roethlisberger would force himself on OUR spring looks! #KennethColeTweets
4 minutes ago Favorite Retweet Reply

@KennethColePR Those Long Island dumpster women must have been wearing our spring collection. Killer looks! #KennethColeTweets
6 minutes ago

@KennethColePR Locked in Charlie Sheen's closet? Tweet how many pairs of Coles he has! #KennethColeTweets
16 minutes ago

@KennethColePR Our Tucson store is locked and loaded with Spring looks!
#KennethColeTweets

In an age when even the most egregious headline-making behaviors can help boost awareness and careers, some things are better left alone. Tying one's marketing to the historic and deadly events unfolding in Egypt is one of them. Look for a huge apology from Kenneth Cole himself (if he's smart).

Update: He is. Apology via Facebook.

Bada Bada...Sting

Tweet

If you're in the search space and want to make some noise, there are few influencers who are as, well, influential as Danny Sullivan. He's been at it a long while.

In fact, I remember trying to garner his affections at the end of the last millennium for my search engine client Northern Light, which arguably did a better job at producing relevant result rankings than that funny-sounding company out of Mountain View, CA -- the subject of today's post.

Today we awake to an audacious post (i.e., Google-planted story) in which Mr. Sullivan breaks the boffo allegation by Google that Microsoft's ascendant search engine Bing is stealing its organic results. (Thank God it's not stealing Google's paid results.)

Microsoft offered Danny this non-denial denial:

"As you might imagine, we use multiple signals and approaches when we think about ranking, but like the rest of the players in this industry, we’re not going to go deep and detailed in how we do it. Clearly, the overarching goal is to do a better job determining the intent of the search, so we can guess at the best and most relevant answer to a given query."

Search Influencer Sullivan

Undaunted, Google let the other show drop late today with its own post and supporting graphics (from a "Google Fellow") on its own blog. It started off like this:

"By now, you may have read Danny Sullivan’s recent post: “Google: Bing is Cheating, Copying Our Search Results” and heard Microsoft’s response, “We do not copy Google's results.” However you define copying, the bottom line is, these Bing results came directly from Google."

Typically Google doesn't use "influencers" like Sullivan to do its bidding. Its blogs have the capacity to unilaterally make news. But in this case, Google apparently felt it had such incontrovertible evidence, why not roll the dice and let Danny have the first shot at it?

In a nutshell, Google set Bing up, and Bing took the bait. We clearly have not heard the end of the MS-Google rivalry, though I do wonder how Microsoft can explain its way out of this one. Spam, anyone?

"The Sting" (1973)

Of greater interest to me is how this little sting and the media coverage it's spawning will play into the fortunes of the recently beleaguered Google search franchise.

What? You haven't noticed all the pot shots Google has been taking of late by all those Facebook aficionados? Some might even opine that this bad kharma hastened the recent change atop the online advertising juggernaut.

While I remain extremely bullish on Facebook, especially as a data-rich advertising platform, Google Search still holds significant resonance for me and countless others. Today's shot across Bing's bow could very well help the search engine's tarnished reputation.