GOOGLE STREET VIEW JAPAN VIDEO

A cool video from Google Japan. It's a whimsical explanation of how Google street view is made. Worth a peek.

USING POWER OF CROWDSOURCING TO RE-MAKE STAR WARS

Star Wars: Uncut Trailer from Casey Pugh on Vimeo.

A group of Stars Wars fans is trying to remake the original Star Wars film by crowdsourcing the production. The entire movie will be made out of fan-generated versions of Star Wars scenes. This is probably as geeky as it gets, but you can see there is a big idea in there somewhere. Most film credits already include huge lists of many different specialist firms, so why not take it even further and distribute production of different scenes to different directors?

For more information click here

IAB SOCIAL MEDIA COUNCIL - MY AGENDA

I was recently elected Chair of the Internet Advertising Bureau's Social Media Council. See here for more detail.

The IAB social media council comprises of media owners, social networks, brands, creative, media and specialist social media agencies and was launched in 2008 to educate the industry about the opportunities within this space. With a range of experience and expert knowledge, the council’s collective remit includes word of mouth marketing and blogger outreach, content distribution, digital creative and social media research. I will take over the role from Lloyd Salmons, founder and CEO of agency Outside Line.

I will spend the year facilitating meetings, engaging with industry leaders and driving council initiatives, and acting on a proposed ‘6 Point Plan’ for the group:

1. Empowering ambassadors of specialist topics within the diverse membership of the social media council, thus giving every member a voice.

2. Sharing the council’s knowledge and practical guidance with the wider industry via editorial and video content each month.

3. Promoting the council as a ‘shop window’ for social talent and agencies.

4. To create standards, tools, templates, and systems to help grow the social media business in the UK.

5. To liaise directly with industry influencers on a regular basis with focused presentations and case studies.

6. To lobby and promote social media and the council to the major holding companies and industry bodies to ensure all relevant groups are talking in the same language.

Point 4 is of particular importance. Creating standards, tools, and systems will be key in growing the business, and upgrading it from a cottage industry. My aim is to bring some of the open source sensibilities already prevalent in social media into the social media council, so we can grow the overall business. We'll be developing tools, templates, and processes collectively, and will share these with the wider industry. We plan to break out of the confines of the ‘social media cluster’ and connect with the biggest advertisers and agencies in the UK, on their terms, offering training and support.

These goals will feed into the IAB’s ongoing role in supporting the social media industry via educational materials, dedicated forums for debate, marketing and consumer insights.

CONCEPTUAL CONSUMPTION AND THE BATTLE OF IDEAS

I recently found this clever infographic at thisisindexed and it got me thinking about information, and how we use it. Too much information is bad. Equally, too little information is just as problematic.

A recent paper published through Harvard Business School argues that "As technology has simplified meeting basic needs, humans have cultivated increasingly psychological avenues for occupying their consumption energies, moving from consuming food to consuming concepts".

The things we consume conceptually are memes. They are everywhere as we seek more and more conceptual consumption. There are more ideas out there than brains that can host them, which is why some ideas prosper and flourish, and others fail, and die. There is an evolutionary battle of the fittest happening on the web, and elsewhere everyday. We can now see what ideas are on the up, and which are on the way down using data visualisation tools, and even search traffic. Product lifecycles are much shorter now, musical sub-cultures come alive and then fade quickly, and fads and fashions disappear at the blink of an eye.

Is there an upper limit to how much, and how quickly we can process all these memes? There are more memes, and more people to connect with than ever before. Kenneth Gergen in his book The Saturated Self argues that we have reached a state of social saturation.

This all sounds pretty depressing, except for one silver lining, which is that we can now - more than ever befeore - process these memes collectively, using collective intelligence, and distributed brain power. Social media allows us to share and process memes. Think social boomarking on Delicious, and Digg, or Yahoo Answers, think Google search algorithms based on link popularity, think ratings, user reviews, and voting. These memes have forced us to our next stage of social evolution.

AXE'S CLEVER USE OF SMS AND PRINT ADVERTISING

This campaign is something cool I discovered on Adverblog recently. It's a cool use of SMS from Axe Uruguay. To see the complete picture of the scantily clad model, the ad simply asked the reader to text Axe to a short code after 9pm (to keep kids away). You then get to see the scantily clad model in her full glory. This is a smart understanding of the Axe brand (which is called Lynx here in the UK), and a great demonstration of how SMS and print can work together.