If you haven’t seen it yet, take a few minutes and go check out The Wilderness Downtown. It’s an interactive film/music video by Chris Milk featuring the Arcade Fire’s “We Used To Wait”.

It’s also the coolest thing you’ve seen in a browser in a long time.

What Milk, Arcade Fire, and a team at Google have done is create something that blurs the line between tech-demo and art. It’s really a little of both. Not only does it showcase the power of technology in creative hands, but it shows people that staying on top of new developments in markup and it’s capabilities is for more than just code-monkeys.

However, there is one area where this otherwise awesome effort falls a little short: connectedness.

If I want to learn more about Arcade Fire, where are my links to Facebook, Twitter, blogs, etc.? Where’s the link to the iTunes store to check out more of their stuff?

If I want to learn more about HTML5, where are the links to code repositories, tutorials, and discussion forums where coders are exploring all of the new possibilities?

I know this wasn’t built to be a marketing vehicle, per se, but by not providing any ability for users to follow up or learn more they’re really missing out on a great opportunity to capture some good vibes.

With all the social media, engagement, crowdsourcing, transmedia, and UGC sentiment flying around lately, sometimes we forget that people don’t want to have to do anything with our brands or ads. It reminds me of Your Brand Is Not My Friend but to a higher degree. Sometimes a good value prop is all we really need.

This (fictional?) situation, along with a lot of what is being pushed lately, strikes me as one of those “if you have to ask, you’ll never know” scenarios, in that if you’re trying to manufacture brand interaction, you’ll never get it. It shouldn’t be our job to beg, borrow, and steal people’s attention and time. Instead we should focus on creating an environment that encourages, facilitates, and highlights that kind of engagement.

Kid build a room full of furniture out of your FedEx boxes? Send him more and see what he can do. Start a contest and buy actual furniture for whoever builds the best FedEx box furniture.

Bros Icing Bros? Let them run with it but start a campaign encouraging people to be Brosponsible ™.

You get the idea. Now leave me alone…for some reason, all I can think about it sausages…

All strategies are note equal – From The Head of Zeus Jones

Cutting Clippings and Musings on The Same – Talent imitates, genius steals (Faris Yakob)

The Ethics of Online Secrecy – The Blog of Mike Arauz

Designing for failure – Alexander Chung

56 Sage Street: the story behind the game – BBH Labs

It seems like there are an endless amount of “thinkers”, people who simply wax theoretical on things but never actually follow through. To the same degree, there are plenty of “doers” as well, people who exist solely to execute the vision of others. What we really need more of, and what I’m endeavoring to be, is “thinkers-and-doers”, a hybrid that not only has the creative ability and long-term vision, but also the drive and follow through to bring those ideas to fruition.

I started thinking about all the things that keep me from following through on my ideas, and over time, most of them could be systematically discounted as “not really great reasons”. Then I got to thinking about what would be some legitimate reasons for not acting.

Here’s two:

1) It could hurt someone - Doesn’t matter if it’s physically, emotionally, or monetarily. If you’re idea/action could lead to harm, you better think it through. Now I’m not talking about “bucking the status quo” or “fighting the man….man” but things like “I’m going to run this investment pool with a Ouija board!” or “I’m pretty sure I can jump this motorcycle over that preschool playground!” – you see the difference.

2) You can’t adjust/amend/iterate – If your idea is being presented, ran, launched (physically), or otherwise needs to be in a final form, running with anything other than a complete version would be shortchanging it. Things like paintings, rockets, pilot episodes, etc. need to be ready before they go.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not against action, in fact I’m all for it now, but sometimes you have to know when to take a little more time to make sure it’s right.

Those are just two that I came up with, do you have any more?

In case you missed the last post (which is directly below this one), I had previously mothballed this blog, which used to be known as A New Marketing, because I wanted to take some time off and refocus my efforts.

Fast forward four awesome months later…We’re getting the band (err blog) back together!

I haven’t been completely off the grid the last four months, I’ve been keeping my digital thoughts/inspirations on my tumblr, The New Necessary. I’ll continue to post things there, so feel free to check it out via the link to the left. I’ve also been down with “the twitter” and you can always find me there.

I’ve spend the past four months doing a lot of reading, watching, and listening. There really is some truth in the idea that you can’t talk and listen at the same time, and I think I’ve picked up a lot more recently while I’ve been focusing on absorbing things. I’ve found a bunch of great new people and blogs, and also adjusted who I follow on Twitter to create a much better experience.

However, I think I’ve got some new things to say, so let’s get this thing going again.

Matt J McD via the Internet

The new title here represents what this blog really is all about. I’m not limiting myself to social media or even marketing in general, but anything I find interesting and think is worth sharing. We’re all multi-faceted people, no sense in unnecessarily confining our ideas.

You can look forward to posts on a range of topics including: digital strategy, technology, gaming, sports, design, style, psychology, social media, market dynamics, etc.

Also, I’ve got a few new projects in super-early stages. You can check these out by hitting the “My Projects” link on the left.

I’d like to introduce one of those projects now, without further adieu…

Discere Centum Project

Literally meaning “To learn one hundred” in Latin, the Discere Centum Project is my mission to expand my horizons by learning 100 new things.

I’m not talking about things like “What is the square root of 467?” but rather legit knowledge and skills like “An understanding of major cognitive biases”, “What are the characteristics of the different kinds of wine?” or “How to shave with a safety razor”.

(the answer is 21.6 btw)

TDCP posts will pop up sporadically as I come up with new stuff and figure it out.

Onward!

So I guess the moral of the story here is: Thanks for sticking around.

I’m going to do my best to get back to putting some kick-ass stuff together. As always, please get in touch early and often.

Now back to our newly schedule programming…

In case you haven’t noticed, it’ been a little quiet around here. Yes, I’ve been pretty busy, but that had never stopped me before.

I think somewhere in the last few months blogging has become “something I really should do” as opposed to “something I really want to do” and that’s a problem. When I started this blog 3 years (!!!) ago, the social media blogging scene was really taking off. It was an exciting time to get into the field because it felt like we were continually breaking new ground and building on the foundation of the ideas that hold up “social media” as a business element.

For those of you that printed out your first weblog posts on dot-matrix printers, that might seem like bright-eyed idealism or rosy retrospection, but it’s honestly how it felt to me. I’m sure the echo chamber was going back then, but, at least to me, it seems like it’s become much worse. So often it feels like the same content and ideas are being rehashed, linked and retweeted so much, that it’s hard to find anything new.

To me, this is where we’re missing the point. The beauty/power of social media lies in what it means and what it does, not what it is. There are much broader issues than how to get a million twitter followers and the right stuff to put on your facebook fan page. Those things are important insofar as they are tactics that support a strategy, but still, they don’t really push my thinking like they used to. Lucky for you there are many, many bloggers out there who do that type of thing better than I ever did.

Which brings us to the point (finally). If you’re skipping down, you can start reading here.

Essentially, A New Marketing as it has existed these past 3 years will no longer be. Don’t be alarmed though, this doesn’t mean I’ll stop writing. In fact, I’ll probably be doing it more.

MattJMcD.com will now become my true home on the web. A new site will go up (relatively) shortly where I’ll be able to explore more of my interests in depth, which definitely still include marketing, tech, etc. but also pop culture, gaming, sports, and anything else that gets me jazzed up. I like to think of it as a more well-rounded MattJMcD experience. (ha!)

However, I do realize that some of you may only be interested in the marketing end of things, so don’t worry, I’ll make sure it’s easy to separate that content out.

Either way, I’m excited for this transition and am looking forward to the new opportunities and challenges that come with launching a new blog. Stay tuned and be on the lookout for MattJMcD via The Internet via MattJMcD.

As always, thanks for reading.

That’s kids table stuff, right? Everyone knows that, I’m sure. It’s not like we’re asking about dynamic style sheets or to explain the QDF piece of Google’s algorithm.

Just watch.

Sheesh. Like Mitch says, maybe this explains why we get blank stares when we try to explain how Twitter fits into a business plan.

Think about that the next time you’re trying to explain why you should create value by engaging your community, activating your base, and empowering your biggest fans through one-to-one interaction and brand transparency.

One thing this got me thinking about was the fact that to be “social” doesn’t necessarily mean you have to tweet or have a Facebook page. If you offer services or technology that works with, augments, or improves inherent social behavior, you can have more of an effect than any number of tweeted links.

Much of this unnecessary patter is due to the unrealistic expectations brands (and the agencies and consultants that enable them) have for social media. Where, in a misguided quest for easily understood metrics, success has come to mean x number of Twitter followers or y number of Facebook Fan Page updates each month

This is something that drives me nuts. Social media marketing is, at its core, marketing. It’s goal is to increase sales, sign-ups, usage, etc.. Move the needle. As Alan mentions, these metrics are easy, and that’s what makes them benchmarkable, but in the end, do they really matter?

Later in the post, he’ mentions a few things companies undertaking social efforts need to understand. My favorite:

You need to find one particular area of social media you feel comfortable with – which might just be a blog or a YouTube channel — and concentrate on being really, really good at that, especially if it makes sense in terms of who your customers are.

So many people spread themselves too thin. Don’t waste 5 hours a week developing an executing your Twitter strategy if you only have a few customers there. It doesn’t matter if you’re getting “You Need to Be On Twitter!” in every newsletter and journal you get. If it’s not right, don’t waste time.

Read Alan’s entire post here.

His main point is that the ad wasn’t necessarily about Google Search, but more of a proof of concept for their advertising (which includes search ppc, television, etc.).

Google has been trying for years to help advertisers think about the relationship between Superbowl [or any TV spots] and search and online video, [...]

and that the proof of any new platform requires big brand case studies and support, and that having your own is always useful when talking to agencies….

And in fact they have already said they are running Chrome spots across their TV AD network as a LIVE CASE STUDY OF HOW THESE THINGS WORK TOGETHER…because you can use insight from online deployment to better plan the TV, as I’ve been saying for years, because the internet gives you real data, not nonsense from pre-testing focus groups

I think a big thing to think about here is that Google is looking at all these venues of advertising as an ecosystem, not “TV viewers interact with ads this way” and “Web users interact with ads that way”. Also, taking insights across platforms could become extremely valuable in the near future.