Keep Life Sexy / Personal lubricant rebrand through UGC

www.keeplifesexy.com is KY-Jelly (a personal lubricant)'s venture into UGC-powered advertising.



The concept is really simple and straight-forward, to the point where I actually question its creativity. That said, I also felt that many interactive seen these days are so 'innovative' that the target audience might just not get it.

Bottom line: it's an innovative approach to any pharmaceutical marketing site and it succeeds in updating my brand perception for this old-school standard. That makes for a successful campaign.

via Tom Ajello's tweets

©2008 See-ming Lee 李思明 SML / SML Pro Blog / SML Universe. All rights reserved.

LinkedIn store now open

How do you make money off of social networking sites? Besides selling AdSense ads, here's another way to do it: open up a store and sell branded materials. Professional social networking site LinkedIn is doing just that. As I hook up with my 380th connection today on this popular site, I noticed this banner ad on the page:



which links you to the LinkedIn store. Right now the items are not very imaginative: but one can just imagine the magic of it all if they would allow customization. Something like See-ming Lee, proud LinkedIn user. Connect with me at http://www.linkedin.com/in/seeminglee would attract customers like never before.

Truth be told, you don't even need a high-tech solution to do the job: You can do as as simple as giving people the option to write their URL or their name on a designated area with a water-proof marker (which can come with the shipped package) and people can create customize content by drawing directly on the t-shirt. That'd be fun!

©2008 See-ming Lee 李思明 SML / SML Pro Blog / SML Universe. All rights reserved.

Queen Elizabeth II Christmas Broadcast, 2007

Queen Elizabeth II joins her country folks and posted her annual Christmas Broadcast this year on YouTube:

YouTube: The Christmas Broadcast, 2007 Embedding disabled by TheRoyalChannel so you have to see it on YouTube - Read transcript

The video was uploaded at 3pm GMT on 2007-07-25 and so far has been favorited 288 times, over 900 ratings with 123,651 in 3 short hours. At the time to this writing, it has received 7 honors:

+ #7 - Most Viewed (This Week) - United Kingdom
+ #2 - Most Viewed (This Week) - People & Blogs - United Kingdom
+ #11 - Most Viewed (This Week) - People & Blogs
+ #7 - Top Rated (This Week) - United Kingdom
+ #96 - Top Rated (This Week)
+ #4 - Top Rated (This Week) - People & Blogs - United Kingdom
+ #12 - Top Rated (This Week) - People & Blogs

TheRoyalChannel joined YouTube 2 months ago, has 19 videos posted, and now has 14,680 subscribers and 732,121 channel views. Fairly impressive.

Web 2.0 save the queen.

Related SML Universe
+ Life 2.0
+ SML Channel
+ SML Data
+ SML YouTube

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©2007 See-ming Lee 李思明 SML / SML Pro Blog / SML Universe. All rights reserved.

Google Christmas Map 2007

As the official Google Blog reported, The Google Blog team created a map for users to customize and jointly create holiday greetings. I have made my mark... loud and clear :)


View Larger Map

Cheers and happy holidays from SML Universe

:)

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©2007 See-ming Lee 李思明 SML / SML Pro Blog / SML Universe. All rights reserved.

UGC = Love + Culture + Free Speech / Larry Lessig / TED Talks

Stanford professor Larry Lessig gets TEDsters to their feet, whooping and whistling, following this elegant presentation of "three stories and an argument." The Net's most adored lawyer brings together John Philip Sousa, celestial copyrights, and the "ASCAP cartel" to build a case for creative freedom. He pins down the key shortcomings of our dusty, pre-digital intellectual property laws, and reveals how bad laws beget bad code. Then, in an homage to cutting-edge artistry, he throws in some of the most hilarious remixes you've ever seen.

TED Talks: Larry Lessig: How creativity is being strangled by the law

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©2007 See-ming Lee 李思明 SML / SML Pro Blog / SML Universe. All rights reserved.

Interaction design need not involve computers / Jake Barton / Local Projects

I went to the Apple store in Soho yesterday with Trevor MacDermid (Google / LinkedIn / SML Wiki) to see Design Remixed: Jake Barton, an event organized by AIGA New York.

Jake is the founder and principal of Local Projects, an award-winning design studio that seeks to tell stories in public spaces, museums, and over the internet, often simultaneously.

Jake showed a project that I thought was particularly interesting. It's called Memory Map:



It is an environmental design project where the content is entirely user-generated. UGC is a commonplace in the age of Web 2.0, but what is special about this project is that it does not involve technology at all.

In a gist, the installation involves a New York City map, on which visitors of this Smithsonian exhibit share personal stories by anchoring hand-written notes to specific locations related to their memories. Much like the same phenomena witnessed on social networking sites, small clusters of conversations emerge on the map. People felt a sense of connection through these notes, and it is through these memories where the diversity of the city can be felt on this cultural ecosystem.

During the Q+A session which follows the presentation, Jake further emphasized his desire to not involve the use of touch-screens for his museum installations which he felt appear more like ATM machines and thus remove the emotional impact of a stories as told by human beings.

Additional interesting projects presented

• StoryCorps. A nationwide initiative to instruct and inspire citizens to record each other's stories in high-quality audio. Participants receive a CD of their recorded interviews while a copy goes to the Library of Congress for a national oral history archive.
• P.I.E. (The Public Information Exchange). A hybrid digital/physical interface designed to create an archive of the NYC projects, proposals, programs, and exhibitions presented or discussed at the Center for Architecture.
• Timescapes. Said The New Yorker: "Four hundred years of New York History are compressed into a twenty-two minute presentation morphing maps, images, and narration in the new three-screen installation 'Timescapes,' at the Museum of the City of New York. It's an absorbing biography of the city, neatly organized into chapters that outline the city's explosion out into its five boroughs, up into the skyscrapers, and down into the subway system."

Related SML Universe

• Human Human Interaction (HHI)
• Human Human Interface

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©2007 See-ming Lee 李思明 SML / SML Pro Blog / SML Universe. All rights reserved.

Mojiti = UGC on UGC

Mojiti allows users personalize any videos online with annotation in text, audio, or even video on top of the original video!

Here's a demo of it in action (Mojiti: Sony Bravia)



It has certainly taken user-generated content to the next level--it's UGC on top of UGC. Pretty cool!

Related
Mashable: Mojiti Annotates Clips from YouTube, Revver, Google Video
Read / Write Web: Mojiti - China's YouTube 2.0 Adds Annotation To Mix

Looking at the published dates of these articles, it looks like that my radar is not very tuned at the moment but it's better than not knowing about it at all.

Here's a pretty funny spoof video of Microsoft Surface using Mojiti:

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©2007 See-ming Lee 李思明 SML / SML Pro Blog / SML Universe. All rights reserved.

Gender Behavior Differences on Social Networks / Advertising Age

Advertising Age recently did its annual survey on college students and found that there is a significant split in social-networking activities between sexes.

Gender behavior split on social networks
Stylistic edits are mine

• Facebook ranked as the most popular website among the 18-to-24 set
• Social networking was twice as popular with young women as young men
• MySpace, which was No. 1 last year, ranked No. 2 with females but dropped out of the top five for young men
• That means marketers using social-networking sites to target young people are reaching far more females than males
• Men are far more likely to use social-networking sites for business purposes such as LinkedIn

Male college students + UGC / Community

• While their tech savvy showed, particualrly among men who ranked Digg and Engadget among their top 10 websites, they didn't make the leap to consumer-generated media.
• Only 8% said they had uploaded videos to YouTube
• 64% don't make videos at all
• 14% don't share them with anyone
• 75% surf social-networking sites
• 71% read news online
• Only 14% write blogs

Popularity Contest
College students' favorite brands

Source: Anderson Analytics

Advertising Age: 2007-10-04: Apple, Target, Facebook Tops for College Students
Read full article online

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©2007 See-ming Lee 李思明 SML / SML Pro Blog / SML Universe. All rights reserved.

How social media influences change in the marketing practice / MKQ

In the McKinsey Quarterly article titled The evolving role of the CMO (MKQ 2007 Issue 3, pp.29-39), David Court discusses how the change in technology influences change in marketers' roles and how CEOs can help them set priorities and drive organizational change.

Some interesting points noted (quotes):

• User-generated media account for almost one-third of all the time individuals spend on the 100 most visited US Web sites, up from roughly 3 percent just two years ago. Consumers skeptical of push ads are flocking to a medium they trust more.
• Although good for consumers, this explosion of user-generated content comes with big risks for business. Individuals and nongovernmental organizations that don't fully understand the products of a company... can sometimes have as much influence over its image as its marketing communications unit... thus proving to be a short-term PR nightmare for many companies.
• It is, for example, the marketing department that is likely to develop (as Toyota Motor has done) programs to position a company in online communities such as Second Life, the leading virtual marketplace, which provides low-cost opportunities to learn how role-playing consumers would design and use new products
• A deep understanding of the needs of consumers in these markets and the trade-offs they make will be critical in designing products and retail formatss that strike the right balance between price and quality.
• Within marketing, for example, the ability to build brands across an increasing number of media, including vehicles dominated by user-generated content, will be critical.

The article concludes with three ideas for CEOs seeking to help their CMOs and ensure that their companies thrive:

• Take time to understand what's really happening with customers.
• Foster the right connection between the CMO's efforts and those of the other parts of the organization.
• Be a "thought partner" for the CMO as he or she transforms the marketing organization.

Read abstract or the full article on MKQ's website

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©2007 See-ming Lee 李思明 SML / SML Pro Blog / SML Universe. All rights reserved.