One year ago, yesterday, Smirnoff launched it’s award-winning Tea Partay viral video advertising campaign on YouTube. The purpose being to promote it’s Raw Tea malt beverage product. The video used a hip-hop theme to exploit the stereo-typical east-coast preppie style. Something about this video made me, and a lot of other people, watch it repeatedly and talk about it (the true sign of a successful viral marketing campaign). The YouTube Tea Partay videos alone have accrued more than 3.5 million combined views. That is a whole lot of (nearly) free advertising.
Yesterday, in an attempt to repeat the success, Smirnoff released the west-coast response. This time, it is a Green Tea Partay. I am not sure this attempt will prove as successful for the Smirnoff crew, as this video is just not nearly as fun or catchy. But, who knows, sequels do tend to make money in the box office, because people can’t seem to pass them up (regardless of not typically meeting expectations). In addition, YouTube certainly has more users than it did last year at this time. Could that make a difference? Time will tell.
Pownce is a way to send messages, files, links, and events to your friends. You’ll create a network of the people you know and then you can share stuff with all of them, just a few of them, or even just one other person really fast.
Pownce is the newest creation by Megatechtronium, a company that includes Digg.com founder Kevin Rose, among others.
Excited to see what Pownce had to offer I started the pleasurable and quick account creation process. In addition to a great site design, Pownce uses well-designed tooltips that guide you through the registration process:
The copy/wording is great as well. Not trying to hard, but just humorous enough to make the process fun (and more applicable for some):
Okay, all signed up, now what does this service actually do? Well, you can message your friends, send them links and files. But, it is necessary to actually have “friends” in order to do this… Since not one of my friends, that I know of, is a Pownce member yet, I am out of luck. So, I opted to publicly post a link and a message to test the service. Easy enough, but since this is now being used as a micro-blog, you must tell people about it in order for it to be of any use. Why not just use a service like tumblr, which seems to better fit the micro-bloggers simple needs?
In the sidebar I noticed an “Pro” version that you can purchase for $20 annually.
The Pro version removes the ads and allows you to send files up to 100 MB to other registered users. Once again, must have “friends”. Would it be better to use senduit, my favorite file transfer site? Senduit allows you to send anyone files up to 100 MB for free, by creating a unique, expiring URL for the file download. Seems better to me.
But, since I am a firm believer that web convergence is the future, maybe Kevin and crew are on to something by combining these services - only the future will tell. For now, it seems to be just another service that people need to sign up for and will only reap the benefits when Metcalfe’s Law kicks in and the network (and your friend list) grows.
Note: Only mentioned senduit and tumblr because they are great products. It just so happens that they are from the same company, New York-based Davidville. Hmmm…maybe they should combine them and give Pownce a run for it’s money.
Michael Wesch, Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Kansas State University, takes us through round two of the web in less than five minutes. If you have any interest in the web and it’s development, this has got to get you excited!
“Web 2.0 in Just Under 5 Minutes”, Michael Wesch, Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Kansas State University
As if there weren’t enough reasons to hate the MySpace beast, I found that customizing a MySpace page (beyond dancing .gif images, obnoxious auto-playing music or bikini-clad model backgrounds) is tough to do. Why? Because the way MySpace requires you to write the CSS is a mess. In an effort to stop people from covering/hiding the required content and flashing banner ads, you cannot use the # sign to target a element’s ID or for use in hex color codes. In addition, no CSS can be defined in the document header, no CSS shorthand and no CSS comments. Plus, get ready for a mess of CMS created tables.
Luckily, Mike Davidson has taken the time to put together a nice guide to customizing MySpace pages with CSS (on your own and not in a cheesy CSS MySpace page generator).
Here is my favorite comment from his blog post comments:
This is amazing work. You know what you have done? You have finally got everyone’s snooty web designer friends to join MySpace instead of staging protests in the name of good taste.
Haha…now I can actually leave the “snooty web designer” title behind and clean up my page, thanks Mike!
They say advertising 2.0, I say pyramid scheme 2.0. Is it worth it? Bidding is up to $2048, but you can supposedly double your money. I am not willing to take the risk, are you?
The other night I was catching up with one of my best high school friends. A friend that I had lost touch with after college and not seen in the last half-decade. In our phone conversation, he mentioned that he had a MySpace account and asked if he could find my page there. I responded that my website was “my space on the web” and that I didn’t have a MySpace account. I refrained from letting out my inner-most evil thoughts on the most popular social network. In fact, I was genuinely excited that he had an account because I have not seen a picture of the guy or heard from him in the past 5 years.
Upon finally finding his page, after wading through the seemingly never ending MySpace search results, I realized once again why I don’t have a MySpace account and why I never will (at least until many things change).
Clutter - Clutter, Clutter everywhere. I guess this is what happens when you allow people to design there own sites without any web design interest or knowledge.
Ads - Pop ups, pop unders, flash banners, animated GIFs, skyscraper ads. Everyone can advertise with MySpace - and they’ll fit’em all on the same page.
Design - There is none. None that I have seen. None that is worth a second look (usually not worth the first). MySpace is literally a blast from the internet’s past (HTML of 10 years ago).
Music - Music should never start when you land on a page or without user interaction. It is just bad form. It is nasty on the MySpace pages that play music I didn’t ask for and equally bad when Apple’s homepage automatically played their newest TV ads without prompt.
Guys and Girls - Nobody ever let these guys in on the secret - that they will never get a date from writing how hot a girl is in her MySpace comment section??
The Number Game - MySpace seems like the main culprit of allowing everyone to be friends with anyone else. This turns social networking into a popularity game, with the winner having the most “friends”. Kind of defeats the whole purpose, in my opinion.
Don’t get me wrong, I am all for self-expression and people having their spot on the web to share pictures, thoughts, and networks. Just use a professionally designed and controlled social site like FaceBook, Friendster (even though it’s bombing), or any other social network…please.
Update: After saying I would never have a MySpace page, I finally signed up. This represents the power of Metcalfe’s law, that the value of a network grows exponentially with each additional user. MySpace is a large, powerful network - despite all of its shortcomings (see above). I needed to sign up for an account in order to reconnect with some of my college classmates for our 5th year reunion. But rest assured, I will be linking them away from MySpace to this site and my other social networking profiles (i.e. Facebook and Friendster).