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?

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.

I love the UPS whiteboard campaign.

The ads are mesmerizing they are sticky and the creative does not get in the way of the message.
The timing is impeccable. Andy Azula, the artist in the ads and creative director for The Martin Agency, makes what he is doing look easy. The tongue-in-cheek humor has longevity and is the inspiration for some ridiculous youtube knockoffs.

The Martin Agency got almost everything right. The music is perfect. Nearly. You see, the band is called…

THE POSTAL SERVICE.

I am ecstatic to see my (former?) client and good friend Matt Rogers embracing social media and blogomania. Matt is currently in Baylor University’s Executive MBA program and has been sharing insights from his life and his Baylor coursework via his new blog, Free Flowing Thoughts.

Matt recently told me that he was starting a blog war with his good friend, Bill Townsend of Interminds LLC over a presentation that Bill gave to Matt’s executive MBA class. I have never met Bill, but after reading his presentation entitled the Black and White of Internet Marketing, I can see that he CLEARLY knows his stuff and that he is actively monitoring the pulse of the digital space. So this is not a knock on Bill, but an attempt to change his thinking on one point: advertising on social media.