brand management » the constant skeptic

22nd April 2008

I am on friendfeed.com, why aren’t you yet?

Hello readers, browsers, info-snackers, crawlers, and spies. I want to let you know there is a better way to follow what I am doing besides just following my latest posts. Do you want to see what I find interesting on the internet and bookmark? Do you want to see my micro-blogging on twitter? Do you want to read my reviews on yelp? Do you want to see my netflix queue? Do you even care?

Well, the amazing thing is, is that this service is free and you and your cohorts can use it to follow and be followed and updated and joined in the conversation that is going on all around you that is, for the most part, external to the blogosphere. It can be a great tool for businesses to manage their brand as well, even though I think a simple google alert can do that just as well for a neophyte web 2.0 adopter.

Friendfeed is what I am talking about. And it may very well be the harbinger of death to the blogosphere as we know it, at least comments wise.

So, I hope I have convinced you to at least check it out. No, I am not getting paid to push friendfeed on the masses, I just think that the masses will find it extremely useful and engaging, if not downright addictive and distracting. Check out their FAQs page if you are still skeptical.

BTW, barack is winning PA and winning the democratic nomination, for better or worse.

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16th March 2008

“ANNONYMOUS” Anti-Scientology Campaign - A Lesson in Internet Enabled Protesting

originally found on Laughing Squid

“Beginning in January a group calling itself Anonymous began an online campaign against the Church of Scientology (know as Project Chanology), leading to a global protest of Scientology on February 10th. Earlier this week Scientology (or people claiming to represent Scientology) posted with their own video response to Anonymous, accusing them of hate crimes and terrorism.”

Laughing Squid has a great article from February 11th, 2008 called “Anonymous vs. Church of Scientology”

Here is a video that provides a histogram of the viral campaign taking off from inception to where it is at currently. It is a great example of what the power of the internet and like minded individuals can do. I am not condoning this behavior, it is only to prove the point that the internet can be a very powerful tool for campaigning, brand creation, and brand management.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mGEuGsO9cCA

I picture a new career fieldv(or is it already out there) for internet-savvy individuals that a company will pay to go out and scour the internet to look for bad publicity and to refute the bad press or the negative blog posts about that company. In this case, the Church of Scientology needs to hire someone to go and manage their online brand by attacking back at Annonymous.

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31st January 2008

The new influencers - what shapes the way you think?

Humans by definition are irrational creatures, therefore human behavior is hard to predict. The same is true with online activity.

The good thing for marketers and social engineers alike is the fact that humans are not only irrational but habitual as well. So if you are habitually erratic in the same ways over time, patterns of movement, interaction, and development take shape.

For instance,

My daily routine includes:

- commuting approximately one hour to work and 1.5 hours home.

- going to work and returning around the same time Monday through Friday.

- twittering my updates at least 10 times daily, usually when; i arrive, take a break, find something interesting, leave work, and arrive home for the evening.

some variants that affect my personal entropy include:
whether I ~~decide~~ get tempted to buy coffee or not….
whether an accident occurs on the dc beltway or not (which affects travel time)
whether I choose to eat out for lunch or stay in my office….

I wonder if just by tracking someone’s RSS feed of their twitter updates, are their patterns of activity that can be tracked over time and then predicted out according to time of year (school year vs summer vacation, winter vs summer, etc.) If you know of any data visualizations out their that maps twitter activity please drop me a line at theconstantskeptic at gmail.com

and remember this:
change things up a little bit from time to time, because you never know who may be following you in the real world or otherwise….

NOW to get on to the new influencers:

1. companies that create rich infotainment style commercials that engage the consumer.

2. apple (many a band’s career has been launched by having their song featured on an ipod commercial - think of feist)

3. messages that are contagions through humor and vicarity (can you put yourself in the message’s shoes?)

4. Multimedia content is replacing text as the new media that really affects consumer’s attitudes… (the new emerging youtube meme of online users)

5. social networking sites and news aggregators sites as new venues to spread product information (think digg.com, del.icio.us, and stumbleupon.com)

6. Controversial representations of social taboos that are cross-cultural. (nudity, sex, extreme violence, abortion, genocide, war, suicide, etc.)

7. Hidden agendas inserted within online content. (paid for posts by companies to sell products, advertisements masked as academic research results, take a look at fark.com for other examples of this)

8. Content that is high in quality and believability. (the important thing is to make sure you or your message appears authoritative, regardless if you really are or not)

I have noticed that the items that are most contagious and (dare I say) viral, are things that are culturally, linguistically, and politically independent of geographic location.

So, as you stumble around the internet, what affects the way you think about the content you are viewing?

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21st January 2008

ABILIFY - Skeptical Drug You Probably Should Never Take

Do you have bi-polar mania (wtf?) ?
Then this is probably for you!

But be careful, there are a laundry list of side effects that the commercials joyously rattle off:

side effects include, but not limited to:

Very high fever, rigid muscles, shaking, confusion, sweating, or increased heart rate and blood pressure. These may be signs of a condition called neuroleptic malignant syndrome (NMS), a rare but serious side effect which could be fatal

Abnormal or uncontrollable movements. These may be signs of a serious condition called tardive dyskinesia (TD), which may be permanent

Elderly: An increased risk of stroke and ministroke has been reported in a clinical study of elderly patients with dementia-related psychosis

Diabetes, risk factors for diabetes (for example, obesity, family history of diabetes), or unexpected increases in thirst, urination, or hunger. Increases in blood sugar levels (hyperglycemia), in some cases serious and associated with coma or death, have been reported in patients taking medicines like ABILIFY. Ask your healthcare professional about the need to monitor your blood sugar level before and during treatment

On the commercial, it actually states that side effects can be fatal. Madness…. this is why I do not watch live TV anymore.
The only reason I caught the commercial is because I was watching the democratic debates on CNN. (check out the debate on current.com)

Tags: democraticdebates, current.com, drugs, pharmaceuticals, abilify, commercials, ridiculous, television, bi-polar

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7th January 2008

A healthy look back: ufos, alexa, and blogspot

Ok, time for a healthy look back:

There was a time back in 2004-2006 that this blog was located at http://constantskeptic.blogspot.com (go ahead and check it out for a laugh) when this blog was really an experiment for me to fill my time while I figured out what to do with my life. The best thing about that site is that it was free. Now, years later I still get a rush out of watching my readership grow month by month.

I finally broke into the million rank range according to Alexa.com:
(in case you are not aware, Alexa aggregates site rankings for urls and web pages from across the world)

constant skeptic traffic rank change

You can see that everything is on the up and up….

A million sounds pretty bad, but consider the following ball park estimates for how many web sites there are out there:

( via boutell.com )

Web pages in the world, August 2005: 19.2 billion pages were indexed by Yahoo as of August 2005.

Websites in the world, August 2005: 70,392,567 websites were indexed by Netcraft as of August 2005.

Web pages per website: 273 (rounding to the nearest whole number).

Web pages in the world, February 2007: multiplying our estimate of the number of web pages per website by Netcraft’s February 2007 count of websites, we arrive at 29.7 billion pages on the World Wide Web as of February 2007.

WWW FAQs: How many websites are there?

What is interesting is that a lot of you that find my site appear magically via stumbleupon.com, yahoo searches, and google searches for obscure articles about UFOs Read the rest of this entry »

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3rd January 2008

Keeping with my new years resolution - skeptical thoughts on digital cameras and consumer choice

Just a quick post about the lack of real choice at Best Buy - I noticed at Best Buy yesterday that most of the digital cameras all had the same features and looks… I could not believe how much Sanyo looked like Casio, looked like Olympus, looked like Canon looked like Kodak. Maybe you will say that this is just because I am comparing cameras only in the 150 - 200 dollar range.

Ok…. then how about the “revolutionary design” of this Canon T90 SLR camera:

It looks like a rehashed design from the seventies… so bulky I might as well pick up one from a garage sale for a buck… like this one:

Man… what a name… STX-1N Fujica… what great brand management and commercial potential oozing from its machine head core.

The sick thing is that you have to agree that this Fujica (circa 1980) has tons more vintage style than the T90 will ever have. No one will look back in 2050 and say, man I wish I still had a Canon T90. Where is the love for sweet polished US exported stainless steel machined hubs and awesome Futura font stamped on a rubberized conveyer belt somewhere in a forgotten factory in ~~a no name country~~ actually probably Japan, better known as Fujifilm.

You see, the constant skeptic definitely has a sense for nostalgia… especially for things that existed before he was born (1981).

What is your favorite camera?

My choice right now would be the Sony with the full touch screen back that takes amazingly clear shots and stabilizes well at speeds approaching mach 1 on the way to Las Vegas at night over fields of crop circles and Roswell hunters and hunted.

I am getting ready for my trip to Pittsburgh so I may have to skip a post tomorrow… (OH MY!) I know you will miss me…. don’t forget to write… smile_wink

Technorati Tags: fujica,vintage,cameras,best buy,stx-1n,sony,casio,canon,exilim,garage sale,futura 70,futura,T90,SLR

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29th December 2007

What I have learned about viral content and what the neo consumer wants

2008 will be the year for infotainment. Well how about the year of peak oil, mortgage meltdowns, WWIII, Dot-com busts (again), hurricanes, death, destruction, wrath… and infotainment.

You probably think of infotainment as Fox News or CNN style news, but I really am talking about content rich advertisements disguised as informative and engaging mini-documentaries. Here is an example:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pMcfrLYDm2U

So, you can see that this type of multimedia will have a huge effect on how consumers are influenced about a particular brand or topic.

personal experimentation with viral content
Just by experimenting on this blog, I have noticed that everyone loves free music. Free anything really. If the title of my post includes the word mp3 and download, or the name of a band, then I know that that post is guaranteed to get at least twice the amount of clicks.

I wonder how many of you will click on the mp3 link that promises music for free for your IPOD. (you can’t resist can you)

Either way, I will be posting my official “PREDICTIONS for 2008″ tomorrow.

Goodnight and goodluck.

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