James Braly’s one-man show, “Life in a Marital Institution: 20 years of monogamy in one terrifying hour” is terrific. He’s fast, funny, warm, clever, insightful, and makes you feel like you were in the room when the events he shares took place. Most of all, he’s the kind of guy you’d want to have a beer with. You get all that from his hour-long intimate monologue in the unbelievably uncomfortable Soho Playhouse (through August 31st.)
Braly’s been compared to Spalding Gray, and he’s got that same kind of effortless delivery. He’s edgy without being pretentious, and his timing is impeccable.
While we haven’t actually had a beer, I have loved all the stories I’ve heard Braly tell at The Moth, where he’s the only person ever to win a grand story slams twice. I’ve told a tale or two on the Moth stage, and any time Braly shows up, you know he’s the night’s winner, hands down. He blogs too.
If only they could tone down the uncomfortably harsh stage lighting and install human-body-friendly theatre seats, Life in a Marital Institution would be a comfortable experience too.
I saw the show with a friend who reviews plays for a major news organization. The PR people, who don’t seem to have a clue, put us, and all the other press way in the back of the theatre. I believe the reason reviewers usually get close seats is so they can see and hear what they are trying to review. Doh. As usual, clueless flacks can do more harm than good.

Page One in today’s NY Times (sub required, try Bug Me Not) “In Court Ruling on Executions, a Factual Flaw” Make that two factual flaws. The first one by the Supreme Court; the second by the Times, whose headline should read “CAAFlog Blogger Discovers Factual Flaw in Court Ruling on Executions.” But the Times, like much of MSM, just can’t seem to stand giving a blogger credit for a scoop.
It takes the Times til the fourth paragraph to mention that Dwight Sullivan broke the story on June 28th on the CAAFlog Blog, and til the eighth paragraph to link to his post. A post on the blog today wryly notes “It may take a few clicks to reach CAAFlog’s post on the case.”
White House issues statement about Times report
In his post, Sullivan noted that the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2006, which was passed by Congress, did set out death as punishment for the rape of a child. In fact, none of the 10 briefs lawyers filed in the case mentioned a bill Bush signed last September adding child rape to the military death penalty.
Like the game of telephone, where the original message is lost, MSM quickly loses mention of the CAAFlog scoop, and credits the Times for the story. Dan Slater, WSJ Law Blog credits “the NY Time’s Linda Greenhouse, who … thinks she’s caught the Court out on a flaw in its facts.” The LA Times Blog doesn’t even mention CAAFlog in its post.
The issue, with no mention of the CAAFlog, has reached the White House, and the Washington Post writes: “White House press secretary Dana Perino this morning said “The White House was disturbed by the New York Times report that the court’s decision might be based on a mistake…”
Likewise, UPI credits the Times for the scoop.
Only the American Bar Association blog gets the headline right “Blogger Points Out Substantial Error in Supreme Court Decision”
I’m not going to get into the tired debate over whether bloggers are journalists. Some of us are. Some of us are not. But you can’t put someone who blogs about their cat into the same category as someone whose blog covers industry news or law any more than you can put “Meet the Press” in the same category as “Dancing With the Stars.”
The bottom line
Mainstream media is still scared of bloggers. And they should be. We’re watching them very closely. Every day. Just like they watch us. Only we credit and link to them. Maybe some day they’ll return the courtesy.
Related:
Do Bloggers Break News?
Blogger Huffington Blasts “Old” Media
AP vs Blogger BrouHaHa New Realities for Old Media
TechNewsWorld: The Top 10 News Stories Broken By Bloggers
Posted by BL Ochman

Skype has created what it hopes will be a viral video to market its free video calls. It’s The Laughter Chain, and they want you to join it. While the video definitely has a few funny moments that made me laugh, it’s also got canned, fake laughter — and, well, that’s just not funny.
Nonetheless, the idea’s cool, and a technological wonder to non-geeks like me. Plug in your webcam, or the built-in camera on your Mac (eat your heart out PC people); watch the Laughter Chain video, as you film yourself watching it. Sign their terms, press send, and your video is sent to Skype for possible addition to the chain video.
Just about nothing that calls itself a viral video actually goes viral, so it remains to be seen what’ll happen to The Laughter Chain.

Do viral videos actually sell product? Yes if you’re Weezer, whose video of their new single, Pork and Beans, has been viewed more than 10 million times (counting all the versions online), including nearly nine million views on the band’s official YouTube channel. Those downloads translated to Billboard Top 100 charts within weeks.
What made the video go viral? Virals! The video is a collection of Internet memes from Numa Numa to Chocolate Rain, Evolution of Dance, Blendtec, Miss Teen South Carolina Answers a Question, and The Diet Coke and Mentos Experiments.
It’s a marketing coup for the quirky band, and should also be a wake-up call for all the agency types who are endlessly scratching their heads (and other body parts) about metrics.
You wouldn’t know the geeky memes if you weren’t, well, a little geeky yourself. The video celebrates the sometimes weird individualism of its stars with a duet between Tay Zonday and Weezer guitarist Brian Bell, and shoe-obsessed drag queen Liam “Kelly” Sullivan showing a Rubik’s cube champion that he can solve the puzzle in under 10 seconds and lots more in jokes. The song’s anthem: “I’m gonna do the things that I wanna do / I ain’t got a thing to prove to you.”

Originally, the band let anyone embed the video anywhere, but the embed code has been removed from the official video. Now it’s back, on the Polydor channel – their record company. Smart move!

I love RocketON! And I think you will too. I have 500 sneak peaks to RocketON’s closed alpha for What’s Next Blog readers.
Instead of going to a site to play a massively multi-player game, San Francisco-based, venture-backed startup RocketON has actually placed a virtual world on top of the Internet. Your avatar can roam the Web with you, inviting friends to join, discuss and interact on any site.
RocketON was co-founded by two veterans from the gaming industry – Eric Hayashi and Steve Hoffman. They gave me a personal tour the other day, and I’m knocked out by RocketON.
TechCrunch explains how it works. What fascinates me is the marketing potential. It’s a whole new branding system, destined to reach Google AdWord proportions. In fact, I’m already discussing ways to have two clients partner with RocketON.
The demographic target is 13-25 – the age group that loves to interact with friends, but my guess is that the appeal will span age groups. You can design your avatar, down to its eyebrows; have your own stuff; and your own room, which you can furnish with stuff from participating websites and from the RocketON store. You also can own virtual pets, go on virtual dates, place bets and go to parties.
It’s fun, but more than that, it’s a brilliant marketing tool. RocketON can build out a commercial space on any just about website; or a company can build its own virtual space. For example, MTV could have a door open into a virtual club where avatars could interact with videos or MTV reality shows.
Your avatar could buy virtual goods that mirror the goods for sale on a given site, and you’ll be able to try on clothes in a virtual dressing room. So if Ikea partnered with RocketON, you could buy a couch for your home, and your avatar could buy a virtual couch for his or her online room. At the GAP, you could both buy clothes, etc, etc.
“The front end is flash,” says Hayashi, “so any flash developer can build spaces, environments and games without having to invest millions to create a virtual world.”
Among RocketON’s great features:
Quest – which will give users missions to go out on the Internet to collect things. That will let companies can participate in or sponsor virtual treasure hunts.
Rockin Sites – lets you direct friends to cool sites and bookmark them.
Wormholes – kind of like the Rocketon equivalent of Google contextual advertising, where partners can create contextual virtual links to a site that has prizes, points, games or goods from that brand for avatars. In the beta, when you go through a wormhole to a Pepsi site, you see a virtual soda machine that gives you a virtual can of soda for your avatar.
RocketON’s revenue models are:
1) The purchase of Rocket Dollars by consumers
2) Branded virtual goods, like GAP outfits, Nike shoes and can of virtual Coke
3) Driving traffic to partner websites through games, contests and treasure hunts. “For example,” says Hoffman, “if we pace a valuable virtual item on a website and let our users know about it, they’ll have to go to the partner site to pick it up. In other words, Google Adwords in a virtual world setting, where we drive users to sites that participate with us.”
While the interface is very simple and intuitive, the features are many, and the best way to learn them is to spend some time with RocketON.
Once you download the software, RocketON is super-imposed in the bottom corner of your screen. You can go to any site on the web and invite friends to bring their avatar there too. Then you can chat, play games, and, if the site is a partner, download virtual goods from the site for your avatar to use.
The basic service is free and you can try it before you download the software to see if you like it. I bet you will! I’m whatsnext, friend me and I’ll friend you back so we can Rocket around the Web.
There are 500 sneak peaks available for What’s Next Blog readers. Blast Off!

The following is a 936-word press release I received today from Wyndstorm Corporation. It sucks.
The best re-write – chosen by What’s Next Blog Readers – will win a Seth Godin Marketing Guru Action Figure.
Why this press release sucks:
1. It’s full of jargon
2. A “destination widget”? Gimme a break.
3. I don’t know WTF they are talking about, and I create widgets for clients
4. It’s 936 words, including a huge legal disclaimer that seems to say it might not even be true
5. It doesn’t include a link to an example of one of its widgets
I could go on…..
Your assignment, if you choose to accept it, is to re-write this godawful release into no more than 300 words and make it clear what they’re selling and why we should care.
UPDATE: Here’s Seth Godin’s re-write:

my rewrite:
We launched something today, but it’s not very good. Here it is: www.widgetthing.com
# # #

OK, here’s the Wyndstorm release:
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact: xxxxx xxxxxxxxxx
(703) 000-0000 tel.
(202) 000-0000 cell.
pr@wyndstorm.com
SOCIAL NETWORK INDUSTRY’S FIRST “DESTINATION WIDGET” OFFERS FASTEST GO TO MARKET PLATFORM FOR ONLINE SOCIAL MARKETING AND PROMOTIONS
Wyndstorm Corporation Launches Socialframes™ – An Innovative Social Media Platform Integrating Virtual Worlds, Viral Promotion, and Multi-Media Content Management
(June 26, 2008 – Washington, D.C.) – Wyndstorm Corporation (OTC/BB:WYND) (www.wyndstorm.com), the ideas to revenue social media company, announced today the release of Socialframes. Designed to proactively extend online social marketing and online promotions, Socialframes is the social network industry’s first and only “destination widget” – a small snippet of code that provides a user one-click access to a promotional Web site including a virtual world. Socialframes is comprised of a custom interactive environment with tailored content of any media type that can be pushed on a one-to-one basis no matter how many friends are in the Socialframes virtual destination.
The novelty of this innovative social media tool is that it finally offers online marketers and viral promoters fast turn-around customization of an experiential marketing program. Socialframes provides profile-based content management within an interactive online destination that includes in-scene IPTV (Internet Protocol Television) programming and video distribution within a 2.5D interactive virtual reality environment. Wyndstorm has successfully integrated all of these important features into this groundbreaking Web widget.

Read More…

Many Fortune 1000 companies are still treating social media like the Coney Island Polar Bear Club treats the ocean on New Year’s Day – dipping a toe and running out of the water.
A lot of companies that allow employees to blog still have legal vet every blog comment, block Facebook on corporate servers, forbid employees to talk about their work in forums. Some companies simply don’t trust their employees, and others fear lost productivity.
But the social media train has left the station, and the smartest companies are developing social media policies or updating their blogging policies to include social media.
Protecting intellectual property is key, of course, but social media, like Twitter, is used by smart companies like Zappos, Dell, Southwest, and H&R Block for networking, PR, customer service, raising the company’s profile with key influencers, attracting employees, research, learning, broadcasting company news, driving traffic to the company website, and increasing search rankings.
IBM & Sun were among the first Fortune 500 companies to publish their employee-created corporate blogging policies, and now both have updated those policies to include social media participation, which both companies encourage.
The introduction to IBM’s Social Computing Guidelines, created by IBMers, says

“…it is very much in IBM’s interest—and, we believe, in each IBMer’s own—to be aware of and participate in this sphere of information, interaction and idea exchange…
for learning – “The rapidly growing phenomenon of user-generated web content—blogging, social web-applications and networking—are emerging important arenas for that kind of engagement and learning.”
To contribute: it becomes increasingly important for IBM and IBMers to share with the world the exciting things we’re learning and doing, and to learn from others.”

Sun’s Guidelines on Public Discourse, updated last month, says:

“By speaking directly to the world, without prior management approval, we are accepting higher risks in the interest of higher rewards. We don’t want to micro-manage, but here is some advice that we expect you to follow to help you manage that risk.

Have you seen or been involved in the development of an enterprise policy on social media participation? Please tell What’s Next Blog readers how your company is approaching employee participation in social media. Posted by B.L. Ochman
Related:
My 2005 post comparing IBM & Sun’s corporate blogging policies
Jeremiah Owyang, The Variance of Corporate Social Media Policies

How does social media monetize? Not the way ooVoo is doing it.
ooVoo is an online video conferencing service where you can talk with up to six people at a time. The service launched in February with a clever promotion called My ooVoo Day, in which I participated.
But then ooVoo fell off most people’s radar screen, until today, when its agency, Crayon, sent an email saying ooVoo is moving to paid for PCs now and for Macs in a year. I responded saying, “No thanks, I don’t want to pay for Oovoo.” And, apparently, I wasn’t the only one who thought the email meant you either subscribe or don’t use ooVoo.
A few hours later, came this email clarification:

“Apologies- the email that I sent out seems to have been a bit confusing.
To clarify, ooVoo is still free for 3 way video conferencing. The more advanced features have moved to a competitive paid option.”

It wasn’t just confusing – it’s a prescription for failure.
The business model for most social media has been to build up a solid user base and then use it to generate ad and/or membership revenue. The key is to provide a service people love, find indispensable, and want to continue using, even if it has advertising (as long as it’s not obnoxious advertising) or a paid version. But ooVoo’s software was buggy the times I tried using it – which I why I gave up and forgot about it.

Read More…

Marketing Trendlets is a new occasional feature at What’s Next Blog, tracking emerging online marketing trends both cool and uncool.
o Annoying automated phone calls from sites you sign up for. Got three calls this week, including one from Fast Pitch Network. Unsubscribed, and will never put my correct phone number on another site.
o Survivor sites – A positive trend that hopefully won’t become annoying. Jerry White’s Landmine Survivors Network branches into Survivor Corps, Lance Armstrong launches the confusingly complex Livestrong.com.
o Follow requests: Including one’s Twitter name and link in one’s email signature and blog posts.

The brouhaha over Associated Press creating rules about how and how much of its content bloggers can quote centers around the new realities of new media.
One of the ways bloggers build traffic and credibility is by linking to sources. Linking and the conversations it sparks between bloggers and readers is the life-blood of this medium. Sadly, mainstream media frequently quotes bloggers without attribution, let alone links. I’ve always thought that was because they’re afraid that they’ll send readers off their pages and we won’t come back.
There are economic realities inherent in that point of view. But I can tell you that the audience for this blog has grown, and advertisers have profited because I send my readers to other blogs and sources. That’s how trust is built online.
Much of the coverage of the issue has been more than a little hysterical – not to mention poorly researched and often distorted. But TechCrunch hits the nail on the head when it says:

“The game has changed a bit. Many bloggers now ‘break news’ which Associate Press and other mainstream media organizations can’t get a handle on. Our own site – TechCrunch – often breaks stories WAY ahead of the mainstream press. So, who is copying who here?
Most of the time you’ll find sites like us linking to major media sites if they break a story. But you won’t get a link back. So exactly, uh, what is their beef?”

Jeff Jarvis makes an intelligent proposal that AP adopt a link ethic; while Bob Cox of Media Bloggers Association (of which I am a member) notes that MBA has helped resolve many such cases.
To be clear: my content is ripped off the minute it’s posted by scrapers trying to get Google ad money. Screw them. Nobody reads them anyway. The bottom line there is that Google needs to zap those sites and until they do, that kind of theft won’t stop. But that’s another story.
What we’re talking about with AP is fair use, attribution, and linking. New standards are needed. And, like it or not, for that, AP and other MSM will need to join the conversation with us scary bloggers.
Cartoon: Hugh Macleod
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