According to Volkswagen’s RoutanBabymaker3000, powered by Oddcast, this is what Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama’s daughter would look like. She’s a cutie!

And here’s their son. He’s a dashing young lad.

This thing is brilliant. I don’t know if it will sell minivans, but it will get people talking and making babies. Impressions Impressions Impressions!

11/27/2008 – Thanksgiving Day and my baby girl’s first birthday.

The family woke up at 8:00AM highly anticipating: Jaye’s pumpkin muffins, turkey, cranberries, Nana’s gourmet mashed potatoes with squash (and cream!), Nana’s traditional yam casserole with oatmeal and cranberries and marshmallows, (which let’s face it is a richer version of apple crisp that we pass off as a side dish) string beans, creamed onions (which never got made this year), two kinds of cranberry sauce which the kids dubbed cranberry relish and cranberry jel-ish, pumpkin, pecan and apple pie, and birthday cake.

Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade

We attempt to watch the parade with the kids, but they are too wound up. The baby goes down for a nap and Jaye takes the other 2 for a walk in the double jogger. I work on belching monkey while the baby zomps. Wife gets back from the walk, the baby wakes up from her nap and we furiously get ready (at the last minute) for overnight at Nana’s which is 45 minutes away.

The Call

Just as we are about to leave, Jaye’s phone rings. Why do we even say that phones ring anymore? Almost nobody’s phone rings. They usually sing or play a song to let us know that someone is calling. My tone for Gregory Ng is a digital sound. Jaye’s is boing-boing-boing. Anyway, I’m still popping a squat on the couch geeking away when I hear from the kitchen: “THE TURKEY IS ROTTEN!”.

The Motrin product marketing team sat; focused and determined, around the boardroom and pondered new positions that would put them top-of-mind for every(wo)man’s pain relief.  They wanted to let consumers know that their product is the most convenient way to consistently relieve any kind of physical pain for long periods of time.

The question was: “How could this young swat team of Hugo Boss wearing, martini drinking, Wii-playing, Mazerati driving, coed-chasing, millionaire playboys and playgirls get themselves into a state-of-mind that would allow them to truly feel the pain of the consumer?” More Martinis? No. They’ve already discovered Intoxidote. More Late Night Partying? No. They’d been getting by with 4-6 hours of sleep since university.

How would they get into character so that they truly understood the problem? And then it came to them. In order to have their own headaches, they needed to take their cushy, Madison Avenue lifestyles and flip-turn them into massive migraines. Since Pete had been working a lot with Flash of late and since they had been looking for a way to test that social media thing out, they came up with this (below) in an effort to get them into trouble with the top brass and threaten their very way of life:

With Twitter moms enraged and every Google search coming up with scorching disapproval (even it is largely from one small segment of the net), the Chiefs are sure to have their thinkers working round-the-clock thinking of a new spin. Genius! The young guns had done it again. Motrin anyone?

On November 4th, Barack Obama was elected the 44th president of the United States of America.

And at least one person wanted me to let my network know that they were unhappy about it.

Let’s back up. During the election, 1,745,754 people set 4,896,031 statuses that reminded people to vote for either Barack Obama or John McCain.  Given that more than 90% of the people in my network had donated their statuses, I deemed this a good opportunity to buck the trend and set my own status to [STATUS FOR RENT].  the Michael Schneider is a charitable guy, but when it comes to my personal brand, I am a marketer and only willing to whore my status out to a candidate (or anyone else) if they are willing to trade goods, services or currency.

I set my rate to $200 for one hour or $1500 for 24 hours.  Once it became clear that Obama would be elected, one of the McCain supporters in my network told me that they wanted to rent my status and that they wanted me to set it to OBAMA BITES IT.

Given the cut rate negotiated (I wanted to be a pioneer!), I set the rule that I would be able to indicate that I had, indeed, rented my status in the message.

Has anyone else done this? How about being paid to tweet/plurk a message?

In Field of Dreams, Ray Liotta says “If you build it, he will come.” He’s talking about Shoeless Joe Jackson.  People often misquote it as “If you build it, they will come.” I’m one of those people and I’m here to use that analogy to make my point which is this: You can build the coolest, hottest, social-est community on the worldwideweb and it’s going to take a hell of a lot more than launching the damn thing to get people to congregate.

Three Must Haves When Building an Online Community

Promotion

People need to be able to find the thing. Organic search is your friend, but it is also a lot like a Miracle Gro. You will see the benefits, but that tomato you planted today is not going to bare fruit tomorrow. With a little bit of audience analysis, you can target the sites they prefer and put up some banner ads that will assist your paid search.

Seeding

Get some creative people to seed content for you. If you are Staples and you are putting together a new site, it’s a no-brainer to talk to the people who live your brand every day. I would love to see Staples partner with Lifehacker and have them show people their vision for the Speakeasy. I could see Lifehacker with a budget from Staples and a bunch of creative things to do with their products that make life easier. The Speakeasy needs video content, but I do not want to pick on Staples (in this post).

Training

Video is the ultimate new training tool. Throw together a montage of someone using the site. Show the features and be sure to use an inspirational example. Software tools are doing this really effectively right now. In fact, some of them are doing it in lieu of doing anything else.

TRiiPLES from Jeffrey Hau on Vimeo.

Today’s post is by guest blogger Jaye Schneider. Jaye is a freelance quality assurance and hi-tech market research professional who owns a consulting shop called QA Ready. If you are a business owner or agency in need of quality assurance strategy and execution, contact Jaye at jaye.schneider {at} qaready.com.

Recently, I found myself a little bit envious of the 20-something set. Not because of their youth, or their ability to be just starting out with their lives, but because for the majority of their lives they have been connected to all of their friends via the Internet. Thinking back on my days at school, camp and college and all the people that I lost touch with before the Internet makes me a bit sad for the connection that I missed.  Browsing some Generation Y’s Facebook and MySpace pages, I realize that they have not lost touch with people, they have them all in their networks and can re-connect at any time.

However, as I joined into this new world of people networking, I realized that when someone does not care for you in this spectrum, there are many ways for them to show it. Prior to these friendship sites, losing touch could become a passive act; not returning e-mails or phone calls.  A person could fall out of contact with a friend or acquaintance and never know if it was lack of time, disinterest, or true dislike that caused the connection to be broken.  The Internet friendship sites take the guesswork out of losing touch; if someone wants you to know who they are and what they are doing, you are their friend, otherwise, you are not.

Microsoft Surface may not be about immediate return on investment, unless of course you are Harrah’s, but I think it could give companies who are willing to take the leap into the 21st century a competitive advantage. In my mind Surface can bring 3 things to user experience:

• Efficiency.
• Uniformity.
• Innovation.

Efficiency

Think about the things that drive satisfaction. In a retail situation, you just want the transaction to be correct and expedient.

Uniformity

People don’t like McDonald’s for the food (do they?), they like it because they know that no matter which McDonald’s they go to, wherever the hell they are, they are going to get the exact same thing. That said, they do not have apple pies in China, they have pineapple pies! Brilliant! Surface has the power to bring that uniformity.

The general sentiment of the blog-o-social web is that the Seinfeld ads were terrible. They produced a sort of anti-buzz throughout that resonated on blogs, twitter, seesmic and vimeo.

In other words, everything went exactly as planned.

Microsoft knew that one of two things would happen. People would love the approach and they would begin a long series of Bill & Jerry ads; or people would think they are terrible and people would begin a wave of criticism and disdain for the campaign, not the product.  In the process, they would tell Microsoft exactly what they really wanted the brand to be and Microsoft would react… swiftly.

The ads were released in early September. This chart shows a spike in Microsoft, Seinfeld and PC related buzz on twitter. Granted, the buzz was generally negative, but if the ads had been funny, people arguably would not have reacted so passionately.

This buzz is consistent across social media properties:

• Microsoft needed to brand themselves for the everyman.
• They needed to remind people that they are crushing Apple
• They needed to explicitly state that it’s OK to do what everyone else is doing
• and that the lion’s share of computing is running on PCs

Loren Feldman of 1938media nailed it.

Coincidence? If you believe that any PR is good PR, then Microsoft got their wish with the Seinfeld ads. They also got a load of free consulting from bloggers, nanobloggers and the media. Shortly after everyone told Microsoft what they wanted, they got it. Seinfeld and the Bill & Jerry campaign were “canned” and “I’m a PC” was born.

Ha ha suckers! Pure Genius. Oh and kudos to Wired for almost realizing that it was all part of the plan.

It all started a month ago when @melkirk tweeted:

re: @chrisbrogan’s tweet:
chrisbrogan Is Twitter an intern-level responsibility for a business? http://tinyurl.com/5u75pe . Look@comments

Like anything with Twitter, the more transparent you are, the better. It depends on the social media related goals of the company. I see pros and cons to this dip-your-toe-in-before-jumping-in strategy.

If the intern is twizzlin’ to get a sense for web related buzz, to make announcements about upcoming objects-of-interest, or take feedback with an “I’ll check and get back to you” sort of flare versus being expected to be the online voice of the organization, then I think it is excellent. The intern could be twitter triage! It would be difficult to expect an intern to be able to represent the company. That’s a lot of pressure for someone who may not know the company very well.  That said, if Claris Networks has not made a “we’re on twitter” announcement to their customers, they might find that they have a limited, manageable following/stream at first that they can use as a microcosm for what they actually want.

Businesses should expect that they are going to achieve limited benefits vs. putting an executive or even a full-time community manager online. And I’m sure they do. Businesspeople are smart. They understand the value of their resources and tend to (at least it is their best intention to) allocate their sparse resources carefully. We don’t all have AT ATs, Tie Fighters, Battle Cruisers and Death Stars at our disposal!

Looking hypothetically, I can picture the decision makers of Claris Networks in a room talking about social media and its impact.  I can picture both evangelism and nay-saying. I could picture them coming to the conclusion that they should be doing something and that either they will use an intern to get learnings about the benefits or  use them until they can hire a community manager (anyone checked their site for this exciting potential career opportunity?)

If you look at Claris Networks’ twitter stream, it is pretty sparse on the “social” and heavier on the announcements. This article will certainly help them shape their strategy and perhaps help them engage in a more warm and transparent way. I’m a new follower and I’m excited to see how their twitter and social media presence evolves. 加油 Go Claris Networks! 加油 Good to see an increasing number of people like Brooks Brown out there who get it!