I’ve been running around like a fly with a blue backside the last few weeks. However after a bit of down time today I came across two great campaigns that I would hold up as shining examples of great digital work.

The first one is Sony’s Fantasy Festival partnership with Last.fm. You have an imaginary $1M to spend on your fantasy festival line up and the winner is the person whose selection has the most buzz online- kind of like Fantasy Football for music. Here’s my effort…

Why do I like this?

The communication is tied into a product. Once I’ve picked my line up and named my festival I can listen to it on Last.fm and share it with friends. Simple idea but cool.

It’s a genuine experience not just a prize draw. I spent ages battling with my consciousness. Do I put some super bands like Muse in that have a lot of buzz even though I don’t like them, or ‘keep it real’ and stick to my favourites. Seriously have a go, you have to make some brutal decisions.

The second campaign is from HP who is raising the awareness of the Global clean water crisis by supporting a team of climbers looking to reach the summit of Mt Kilimanjaro.

They don’t start till January but you can track their progress via a website that is the equivalent height of Mt Kilimanjaro in pixels – check out the scroll bar! Neat idea from Goodby

@carlmoggy

From the vault: I do like this visual thesaurus tool/website http://www.visualthesaurus.com. Creatively it’s never easy finding that perfect word but this tool makes life a lot easier. Hopping between words is effortless and the definitions are always to hand. The default animation can be a little distracting at times but you can tweak the settings somewhat. The only downside – trial is pretty short, and then you’re up for $2.95 per month or $19.95 a year.

http://www.visualthesaurus.com

~@eunmac

These concept pants called “Dancepants” will generate energy to power you MP3 player from the kinetic energy from the movement of your feet. Basically as long as you keep running (or dancing) you will be able to hear your music.

great concept? definitely!

Will it make me run longer? probably not, but I didn’t waste any energy

found here

Fractal lovers, brace yourselves. Here you will find some awesome pictures of the 3D Mandelbrot, “Mandelbulb”. Infinite awesome, on infinite levels. Here are four of the more impressive perspectives:

An interactive quiz to promote the launch of the Motorola Dext (‘The Super Social Networking Machine’). This quiz connects to twitter, facebook and myspace and tests how well you know your friends by pulling data from their profiles and feeds.

Pretty cool ‘eh.

@handypearce

MC Hammer at Social Media Club Sydney

Social Media Club Sydney (SMCSYD) was transformed Tuesday night, 10th November 2009, spellbound by one unique individual, the one and only MC Hammer. As programming director I was the one of the first to find out that MC Hammer was coming to Sydney thanks to Iain McDonald and his Twitter relationship with Hammer, which again shows the power of connections made in social spaces. We moved venue to the University of Technology Sydney to accommodate the format that Hammer had used with the Harvard Business School, and it gave the talk the gravity it deserved.

Hammer, listed as one of the top social media users on WeFollow is passionate about social media and entrepreneurship. What makes him so engaging is his deeply personal point of view: everything was related to his own experience with Twitter his blog, and the people he interacts with online.

Hammer’s insights are related to what he’s gained transforming his personal brand into a social personal brand

• wanting to engage directly with the audience and he tweets for himself – “never let anyone else tell your story”
• he’s a “supergeek” and is connected all the time – “I have this phone and that phone and this device and that computer”
• Likes to be at “the centre of the flow of information”
• he uses Twitter to address any issues as they arise because “perception is most important”
• if people are negative – “you block ‘em”
• what you can’t touch – “you can’t touch the concept Hammer time”
• transparency is paramount, its important to be yourself
• the way he’d reinvented himself more than once from rapper > social media advocate > Harvard Business School lecturer
• the power of social media to transform the world

Hammer also spoke a lot about being an entrepreneur and music and the people he’d met and become friends with like @Ev. He did have some advice for brands not to run and hide from social but to embrace and own the space Sure, it may have been stuff we knew from our own experience or had heard before, but not like this. Hammer was transformative because he had lived every moment of it – none of it was theory, it was all personal truth.

What made it complete for me was to watch him live his personal brand, to the last degree, to talk individually to all the people who waited for photos and autographs. He responded to questions, engaged genuinely, one-on-one.

I’ll finish with a story he shared with us when commenting that he really liked my husband Mal Damkar’s tie. He told us the story of how he went to an upmarket restaurant in NYC with Ev from Twitter, and it was the kind of place that they wouldn’t let you in unless you wore a tie. Ev, being the casual kind of guy, had to go out and buy a tie to get into the restaurant. Hammer (immaculately dressed for SMCSYD in a suit, tie, shirt and cufflinks) thought this was hilarious, so he took a photo of Ev and tweeted it out.

Hammer, to me, represents the new type of social brand: radical authenticity, when social persona and reality are one.

It’s expected that 40 world leaders will attend this year’s COP15 climate change talks in Denmark next month to hammer out the details for what is hoped will be the successor to the Kyoto Protocol, which expires in 2012. Fifteen journalists, winners in the Earth Journalism Awards, are being flown to Copenhagen to cover the two week conference.

The organisers, the Earth Journalism Network, are making great use of social media to plug this event – obviously they’re marketing the awards themselves all over the usual social media, but there is also a final sixteenth award which is determined by user interaction. All fifteen journalists are finalists, and the whole world gets to vote for an overall winner of the Global Public Award using the EJA site, but also on Twitter by retweeting #ejavote and the URL of the story. Additionally, each entry has its own Facebook fan page, for which every fan constitutes a vote.

This is a great mobilisation of social media tools to get what is an environmental/political issue under the noses of the millions of tweeters and Facebook fiends.

Local journo, John Pickrell from Australia’s own Cosmos Magazine (they who brought us HelloFromEarth.net), is one of the fifteen finalists for his piece on ocean acidification and its effects on our very own Great Barrier Reef. You can read his and all the other finalists’ articles on the EJA website and make your voice heard – http://awards.earthjournalism.org/finalists.

“In today’s increasingly digital world, the experience is the message.” Razorfish’s Group Vice President of Experience Planning Garrick Schmitt (@gschmitt) introduces the 2009 FEED Report, a concise and invaluable output of leading edge digital consumer research.

Topics include:

• Digital Brand Experiences Create Customers
• Actions Speak Louder Than Advertising
• Digital Fluency
• The Language of Love for Brands? Deals.
• Measuring Brand Engagement

…and more.

“This report is probably the best analysis of online consumer behavior” according to Guy Kawasaki.

Check out the blog:
http://feed.razorfish.com/

Download the report:
http://feed.razorfish.com/downloads/Razorfish_FEED09.pdf

If you want to tweet about the report, use the hashtag #FEED09.

@iclazie

[Sorry, I had to use all the various meanings of the word just to ensure there was no misunderstanding as to what this post is about]

At the moment my Mo looks more like I’ve drunk 10 cans of Coke and licked my top lip, but it is still early days. However this isn’t about me and my Mo, although you can sponsor me here should you wish, it’s about why Movember is a perfect example of marketing in a social world.

It has social object

OK it’s for a good cause and bog paper might struggle to emulate this, but it demonstrates the need to unite people around something compelling enough. In this instance it happens to be a good cause, but it could just be a good idea.

Secondly raising awareness and funds for Men’s health is arguably under represented compared too many other causes; you could say it’s a challenger. Everyone wants to support the challenger.

It gives people something to do

It’s not just a Facebook group where you sign up and forget about it or where you change your Twitter avatar and feel pleased with yourself. It requires people to actually commit to doing something. We all know actions speak louder than words these days.

It makes things spread

It unites groups of people with some real social fuel. There is something to talk about, it’s highly competitive and narcissistic (in a weird and slightly perverse way). Nobody wants to be told they have a dirty lip now do they.

It visualises things happening within groups. People copy each other and the more people that grow a Mo, the more people will a) find it acceptable to grow one or b) Feel left out if they don’t and follow the crowd. Nobody wants to be the first person at the party, so brands need to try and visualise activity and interactions happening, so people feel like everyone else is doing it.

Movember relies on both strong AND weak ties. In order for it to gain significant traction with the population in a short space of time, the ‘handful of influencers’ need to be exposed to the masses – the Mo being the social lubricant and object that is shared across these groups. Brands should ensure that they don’t spend all their efforts on the clump of interconnected cool kids and remember Joe Public needs to be exposed to what is happening.

Social mechanisms

It obviously has the standard Facebook, Twitter and email options so you can spread the word and generate donations, but there is more to the way they feed the fire.

It gives you the tools and reminders to upload and document your progress – as well as fundraising rankings. This keeps you promoting yourself and pushing your efforts through your networks. Brands need to give people something to follow and talk about in order to keep people interested.

Movember gives Mo growers rewards for raising money, including a tickets to the end of campaign party. It inspires people to really push for more money through the month rather than just an email at the beginning. Brands should reward people on a regular basis for giving up their time for you.

Last but not least – it’s useful

For those of us unfamiliar with growing facial hair there is a full on style guide and grooming tips. This should come in handy when rectifying my dirty lip.

Visit Movember and track down your friends and fellow Mo growers

@carlmoggy

A message from Amnesia Razorfish Co-Founder Iain McDonald:

So here it is… This is a personal message to let everyone know that Terry Carney my long time business partner and the other co-founder has left Amnesia. It’s been a long 12 years since we kicked off Amnesia from the back room of a terraced house to being part of one of the worlds largest agencies. One hell of a ride for Terry (TC as he’s known here) and myself. In the last four months we’ve finished our earnout and in parallel with that the company has just taken its fourth owner in under four years (TC and I, then aQuantive, Microsoft, and finally Publicis).

The company is in better shape than it’s ever been but at the same time it’s really been the first chance either of us have been able to consider anything outside Amnesia. After this long you naturally start to think about giving a little back to the people that have had to put up with us during this time (yes, that would be our families I’m referring to . This is something I know is very important to Terry right now. He has all the support in the world from me, and importantly the whole Razorfish network. So the official news today is that TC decided to make a clean break and he has resigned – the reality is that this happened a couple of weeks ago. I haven’t wanted to say anything until now because I also wanted to have a good think about what this meant to me and to make some decisions myself.

So whilst TC is taking some time out from the industry, I’ve personally decided to stick around and see if I can continue to shake some more digital apples down from the tree. I haven’t got my future completely figured out yet but the digital landscape is something I want to be a part of and there isn’t a better place to be than here in my mind.

 
Above: Terry and I working hard.

So despite the sad news (which we only announced to staff today) the atmosphere in here is really positive. Hope everyone will welcome and understand Terry’s decision, and along with me give him a huge pat on the back for a job well done. Thanks Terry – enjoy the break, we wish you well and see you at the pub soon.

Cheers,

Iain McDonald

@eunmac

There’s a sea of portfolio sites out there. Of the best ones there are many that look great but don’t stray far from the typical interface design frameworks and information architecture.

Here’s a collection of five seriously impressive efforts to innovate, take chances, do something unique, delight and surprise… Great stuff.

1. Wonderwall Inc. – www.wonder-wall.com

This Japanese interior design firm presents their work via a sproingy, elastic, 3D, slightly off the grid mosaic interface. It’s just fun to play with and tightly executed. It’s not a facade, either – the transitions and detail views are well thought through.

2. Resn - www.resn.co.nz

Not a new site, but if this New Zealand based creative agency ever changes their portfolio I look forward to seeing how they plan to improve on it. The imagination behind the navigation rollover effects and the presentation of the work in the portfolio section are inspiring. Use of full bleed background imagery and subtle audio really surround the visitor. Great balance of creativity and usability.

3. thetoke - www.thetoke.com

Slick, clean, technical. Slightly ambiguous concept around the identity and the intro, but it all makes for good eye candy. Play with the viewing modes in the top right hand corner to see cool applications of 3D in Flash.

4. bio-bak - www.bio-bak.nl

Wow. Also been around a while but something truly bizarre. It’s a game. The object is to find the site’s navigation. This site has balls. And they’re hairy and badly drawn.

5. Futuretainment – www.futuretainment.com

Ok, so it’s a book launch, not a portfolio, but it’s classic Frost and fits beautifully with the others for a range of inspiration on how to simultaneously provide a stage and set a tone.

Enjoy!

@iclazie

Congratulations to the Mule team for collecting this award last Friday!

http://www.itstartedwithamule.com/ 

And hats off to Soap for taking first.

@iclazie

Created by DensityDesign, this impressive piece of info-cartography takes a while to digest but is worth a look if you’re into this sort of thing.

• Learn more:
  http://www.densitydesign.org/2009/10/02/we-will-be-here-map-of-the-future/
• Hires version for download: http://www.flickr.com/photos/densitydesign/3975416561/
• The sketch that the final piece is based on:
  http://www.flickr.com/photos/densitydesign/3976187364/in/photostream/

Wonder if this belongs on Strange Maps?

Also makes me think of the iA Web Trends Map:

@iclazie

Have you ever asked yourself what purpose flies have?

A German book publisher used them to fly around advertising for them.

Before you start screaming animal cruelty – the “banners” were attached with wax and it automatically fell off after a few hours.

Check out the video

Here’s a nice banner concept from Burger King that uses augmented reality. Grab a dollar bill, hold it in front of your webcam and see what appears. Nice.

@handypearce

Xerox has developed a cheap conductive ink that could potentially be used to draw electronic circuitry. No more etching, just draw!

It’s not quite ready for prime time yet as you might imagine, and you will need some reasonably high temperatures to apply it, but it’s a pretty exciting glimpse into the future.

This TV ad for Bing implies vampires are fans Amnesiafish Jeremy’s photo contest winning lightning shot.

Nice one, Jeremy! You’re a big hit with the undead.

@iclazie

These sculptures by Fabio Viale are made entirely from marble…

more images at today and tomorrow

I was just checking my folder where I keep interesting screenshots of stats (ok, I admit they’re probably only interesting to me but hey… I just like sharing). So here’s some ‘interesting’ moments where power shifts occur in the world of social and UGC. (Note: Stats are from the publicly available Alexa site). Note that I screen grabbed these at the time and saved them because there’s not always a guarantee you’ll be able to get the data in the same state in the future. Currently Alexa now only goes back 2 years since they changed their data analysis so the first screenshot below is something of a collectors item (if you collect screenshots of stats that is).

~ @eunmac

Below: Jan 2007 YouTube clearly passes MySpace.

Below: What has happened since (in a little under 3 years)

Below: Another change in global domination in 2009. Facebook passes YouTube in July.

Below – What’s next? Despite the hype surrounding Twitter it’s got a long way to go to catch Facebook which continues to grow at a phenomenal rate with YouTube appearing pretty solid – although interestingly Twitter appears to be now on par with MySpace and looks set to pass it next month.

I’m a big fan of Kasabian. I’m a big fan of Guitar Hero. I’m not a big football fan(soccer to the aussies) but I’m a big fan of tech stunts. I love this.

@handypearce

Right now, something pretty special is happening on the intertubes.

For the first time, U2 is currently streaming live their headline show at the Rose Bowl in Los Angeles. If you’re lucky enough to read this post in the next half an hour, head to the U2 YouTube channel and check it out.

While not everyone is a U2 fan, you have to admit this is impressive.

I’ll come back and update this post once the stats are available on how many people tuned in.

In the meantime, enjoy!

@AngGraham

X-ray vision – the thing that every 80s child dreamt about – is here. See through walls, cars and other objects … and look like a right dork whilst wearing the augmented reality headset.

@handypearce

Everywhere you go now you see touch interfaces, phones with touch screens, computers based on touch screens, maps in shopping centres are touchscreens and Windows 7 will support multi-touch.

Something we saw in Minority report would give you aching arms after a while and a tablet would just destroy your neck.

So the guys at 10/GUI came up with their own version of the future of Multi-touch and I think it is rather nice. It will take a while to get used to but so did the mouse when it first got introduced.

check out the video:

  Here is the site

simply amazing – 1000 cellphones syncing 53 different ringtone alerts from 2000 sent messages to reconstruct Tchaikovsky’s 1812 overture

On October 14th 2009, Razorfish formally joined the Publicis family. As Razorfish offices all around the globe celebrated with a glass of Bollinger and a boursin cracker, the Aussies did something a little different.

Ladies and Gentleman, Mesdames et Messieurs I give you The 2009 Croissant Games.

 
And some pics from the day here

@handypearce

If you haven’t checked out the Milkquarious rock opera yet and you’re into bizarre milk-oriented retro glam rock psychedelic warfare with unicorn pegasus cows, you should have a look and listen: www.milkquarious.com

The Milkquarious experience includes:

• A lengthy but entertaining rock opera of high tongue in cheek production quality
• Possibly more entertaining running commentary in an optional audio channel
• A competition for students to remake scenes from the movie
• Helpful tips for the students from the creators
• A beat machine just for kicks

All in all a very impressive effort from Goodby Silverstein & Partners and Hi-ReS!

Extending the rock opera into a competition is a great idea. Have a look at the YouTube channel to see what it’s all about. Here’s the lowdown from White Gold himself:

Finally, some more screens from the movie for extra milky flavour…

Enter the battle for Milkquarious…

@iclazie

HT @imgc

A big couple of days for Microsoft as they launch Windows 7. Below are links to the launch in New York and link to the You Tube channel for Microsoft Australia ads where Amnesia Razorfish helped run the social efforts. Well done to the guys locally for a massive effort yesterday.  We love the new operating system and have glowing reviews from the staff on Windows 7 already.

New York

Australia TVC’s

@MicrosoftHelps twitter account

Not only has the Windows 7 launch seen to help us than much better than Vista but Microsoft has also launched a twitter account @MicrosoftHelps which is there to provide customer support to Windows 7 customers. There are 4 ppl behind the account managing queries.

Chris Boden, Lonely Planet’s director of mobile and innovation, said: “The Trippy gadget turns trip planning into a collaborative activity, enabling a group of users to create itineraries together in real time.” The full article is over at Brand Republic.

@carlmoggy

Great video on power of story telling from Canal

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If this is real – it’s bloody awesome. What do you think?

@handypearce