In MediaPost:

According to a report released Thursday by Microsoft.
Seventy-five percent of male Windows Live Mail users ages 18-34
surveyed last summer said they would discuss consumer electronics
purchases over email, while 78% of all Windows Live Mail users said
they would discuss plans to see a movie over email.

The study shows that advertisers who are looking to be close to
word-of-mouth discussions should be looking to get into email, said
Lucas Hulsebos, a managing consultant at MetrixLab, which conducted the
survey for Microsoft. "We found that for many of the largest
advertising categories, consumers are discussing their purchases in
email," he said. "If having a presence where word of mouth happens is
an important goal, then advertisers should be thinking about mail."

Unbelievable! Recommending more interruption, even in private conversations. It’s
like saying, people discuss their purchases in a bar with their friends.. so we
need to be hanging around, listening and then barging in. Advertisers will never learn, it seems.

I let rip on Samizdata.net… again.

via Boing Boing

Seth Godin on the Aqua Teen guerrilla marketing Boston thing:

In the face of high ad rates and stunningly low effectiveness, many
advertisers are getting selfish and angry. Rather than investing the
money they would have spent on ads into products and services, they’re
just running more invasive ads.

…..

I’m cynical that anyone is going to be able to do anything to stop
it. That any government organization or any group of consumers is going
to be effective in stopping the tsunami (and I don’t use the word
lightly) of unanticipated, impersonal and irrelevant spam that fills
our lives. I have no idea if Boston should have spent half a million
dollars on this problem, or if the population should have freaked out
in fear. I do know that whatever they do isn’t going to change the way
marketers do (what they erroneously think is) their jobs. There’s just
too much money on the table.

Read the whole thing.  And here is a post by someone who justifies Seth’s cynicism…

This is marvellous and uplifting.

via Jackie

Which would you prefer to listen to–a dry formal lecture or a stimulating dinner party conversation?  Which would you prefer to read–a formal academic text book or an engaging novel?

…your brain wants to pay more attention to the party conversation than the formal lecture regardless of your personal interest in the topic.

Because it’s a conversation.

In other words, if you use conversational language, the
listener/reader’s brain still thinks it has to hold up its end, so it
pays more attention. It really is that simple, and that powerful (at
least if you really want to help users pay attention and remember your
message).

I was alerted to a great post by Kathy Sierra arguing for conversational style in educational material/books rather than formal. I couldn’t agree more. It amazes me that anyone would propose otherwise, what with the number of hours (and years!) people have to sit/read through boring lectures, speeches, webcasts, powerpoints, statements, documents, manuals, etc. etc. Kathy goes into great lengths deconstructing arguments against conversational style, which she defines thusly

1. It’s professional. Formal language == professional. Conversational tone == unprofessional.
2. It’s easier to localize.
3. It’s more appropriate (whatever "appropriate" meant… we never knew for sure.)

Well, bullshit is what I say. Professionalism is not communicated by formality of the language. It is communicated by the content, which is much easier conveyed in a simple and clear style. Brevity and succinctness have always been worthy aspirations for most writers although only few succeed. Writers most admired and imitated – Hemingway, Greene, Orwell – are men of short sentences and few adjectives. 

Aesthetic considerations aside, it is a sign of mastery of the subject when the writer/speaker can express complex concepts in a simple manner. The ability to do that means the speaker can focus on the audience and the delivery. Interestingly, Kathy offers a simple rule:

If you’re using formal language in a lecture, learning book (or
marketing message, for that matter), you’re worrying about how people
perceive YOU. If you’re thinking only about the USERS, on the other
hand, you’re probably using more conversational language.

Finally, think of Cluetrain, a highly influential book that captured and moved forward the Zeitgeist of the late-90s. Its impact would have been negligible had the style been formal. In fact, the book would not have been written at all as its point was that conversations are the natural way for us to interact. Especially in business. And that the internet has driven the point home even to the suits and people with penchant for the formal.

The power of direct and informal human expression can be immense as blogging has demonstrated.  Pithy and short is the flavour of the day and I hope that formal style will go the way of corsets… mostly used in historical drama or to push matters up where nature had not intended them. So throw away the yoke of formality, you have nothing to lose but your clauses and multi-syllable words that no-one understands.

This is one cool site. The best use of 5 minutes whilst behind a computer screen.

found here via here.

A bad joke warning: 

Q: What do Hilary Clinton’s singing and PR have in common?

A: They both sound off-key online…

When a recording of Hilary Clinton’s signing the national anthem appeared on YouTube and linked to by Drudge report, her advisers did nothing. No national media picked it up and the ’storm’ seemed to be contained in a teacup.

This incident might spur some PR people disturbed by their inability to control distribution of information online to proclaim: you see it’s just like in the real world. If you ignore it, it just might go away.

I believe that ‘doing nothing’ is not an option. Or let me put it clearer. On the internet you are not an institution. If you want to be and behave like one, you get isolated and bypassed. So a media/communications/PR strategy makes little sense. It’s back to communication between human beings, communities and sometimes mobs. The rules of social interactions apply – if people challenge you on something you have done or said and you don’t respond, expect a commensurate impact on your reputation or credibility. If people make fun of you or try to embarrass you, the choice is to remain silent in hope of appearing dignified or to shoot back, with indignation or with humour. It depends. Different responses will be appropriate at different times and different circumstances. That is why etiquette is so complicated. Media and communications strategies don’t even come close. The main difference is that you don’t need to be ‘trained’ for online communication, it’s the one that you already know. And whether you are good at it or not has nothing to do with communication skillz but with respect for others and some good manners.

The good news is that people are becoming a lot more discerning about information too. In an
age of control over information, anything that looked like leak or under the radar information was interesting for that reason. As things get more transparent and easily distributed, not everything appears equally
interesting or potentially damaging.

Repeat after me: "the message" is dead, gone and not coming back. Blogs
are conversations, conversations are social interaction and social
interaction is about your relationship to a person, not a statement.
- Cornelius Puschmann, in a comment on Suw Charman’s post Edelman: Must try harder.

We don’t believe in pre-rolls… says Penry Price of Google. What a relief! I was seriously worried when Chad Hurley mentioned pre-roll somewhere in the flurry about YouTube looking for a "new monetization system" and "sharing revenue with contributors". Apparently, he said in a BBC interview that YouTube may begin running three-second spots before videos. We were not amused… there is a reason why YouTube fans reject pre-roll.

Curt Hecht of GM/Planworks seems to have the right idea. The pre-roll model…

…just doesn’t cut it. It’s not really helping us get the experience out there. It’s an interruptive model.

Surprisingly then, marketers continue to buy pre-roll because the demand is there
from the advertisers, according to Brian Quinn of Dow Jones
Online. What gets my head shaking in disbelief is his explanation.

The post-roll format
has major problems as well. We’ll put your 30 or 60 back there, but I
don’t know if anyone’s going to watch it.

Let me get this straight. The marketing/advertising bunch know or suspect that their ads are unlikely to be watched if they put them after videos that people choose to watch. So the ‘problem’ with post-roll is that people can ignore the ads. Their solution is to stick them before the video and force people to watch them. Amazing. Not getting at all. I can hear the Cluetrain hurtling right past them…

When I got an email from Flickr this morning telling me that by March 15th I will have to use Yahoo ID to login to my Flickr account, I wasn’t happy. But I thought, oh well, what can I do? My dislike of the whole notion and unease about switching to Yahoo was real but I felt irrational so I just left it at that. I didn’t want to think about the issues of.. will my Yahoo ID have the pro account, how is that going to transfer etc. I thought it was just the idea of switching usernames and accounts. This didn’t make sense as I do this all the time – the moment I see an interesting application I sign up, test and either migrate to it, file it or trash it.

What I didn’t realise until I saw the Wired Monkey Bites was that other old skool users aren’t happy either…

This isn’t the first time a company has tried to pass off an artificial
limitation as a “feature,” but it’s the first time Flickr has and it’s drawing fire
from users. I sympathize with those that say, “who cares, those limits
are plenty high enough,” but the change is still a bad move on Flickr’s
part.

Then I saw Ben Metcalfe’s Skype tagline – "Flickr just took the jam out of my donut", read his and Suw Charman’s posts on the topic and felt validated. I started to wonder what made me feel so negative about the announcement. After all, Flickr is owned by Yahoo, I used to have Yahoo mail account and two login systems don’t really make sense technically. So why on this occasion did I prefer to be ‘old skool’?!

Let’s have a look at the ‘rational’ reasons. To me, it’s not about the limits – I don’t expect to need more than 75 tags per photo or ever reach more than 3000 contacts (although you never know ). The fire Flickr is drawing from its users has to do with the nature of community. A lot has been written and powerpointed about the social and the communal on the internet, most of it missing the point. By a wide margin. Community is not a ‘collective’, it is a voluntary association of individuals drawn to something that motivates them to sustain the connection over time. It is a web of such connections between autonomous individuals who are happy to congregate because they feel understood, captivated and derive value from the association.

For me, autonomy is the operational term here… and Flickr made me feel deprived of it as I read that email. I liked being ‘old skool’, proud of the fact that I signed up before they become the poster child for Web 2.0 buy-out. But Flickr is just another company and owned by Yahoo!. Everybody knows that! I hear you say. Maybe, but the reason I liked Flickr was the feeling that despite Yahoo’s ownership, this was a place on which I had an impact, in my small way. I ‘owned’ a corner of it, with my pictures, my friends’ photostreams, comments and a world to explore if I wanted.

And then there is Yahoo! ID that sticks in my throat. My first web based email was Yahoo! Mail and I used it until Gmail came along. Then I checked it only occasionally until one day, I logged on to a completely empty inbox. All my mail was wiped clean! I am sure for good storage reasons but I felt a sense of loss as I had no idea this could happen. So I don’t trust Yahoo any more with any of my ‘content’. Would you? Suw sums up my attitude towards Yahoo just perfectly (and I like the idea of OpenID):

You know, I like Flickr. There are some astonishingly good people
working there. There are also some astonishingly good people working at
Yahoo, but yet I don’t like the Yahoo brand at all. It’s unpleasant. It
says ‘ignorant false-hearted redneck who always hangs on other people’s
coat-tails’ to me. They are a brand that started off ‘pretty cool’ in
the mid-90s, sank to ‘horrible’ in 2001 and have now rebounded to
‘icky’ (in no small part to some absolutely awful TV adverts), with a
hint of ‘cool’ because of the services they’ve bought.

As for two login systems, I understand for some technical reasons it may be more convenient for Yahoo/Flickr, but isn’t Web 2.0 also about making technology secondary to the needs of the individual and bending it to our twisted ways?

So as irrational as it may be, I am not happy about having to switch to Yahoo ID to use Flickr. Dave Winer reckons that Flickr people are smart and all this will come to pass. I really do hope so.