links for 2007-03-30

• French Politics in 3-D on Fantasy Web Site
  All four major candidates in France’s presidential election have opened virtual headquarters in Second Life,
• Grass Roots Planted In Cyberspace
  If there’s a social networking site that John Edwards is not a part of, we’d like to know what it is,

My Article in Politico about SXSW

I wrote an article about my SXSW experience that appeared on www.politico.com today. 

Candidates, Choose Your Campaign Gadgets Wisely
By: Brian Reich
Politico
March 26, 2007

The recent South by Southwest Festival welcomed thousands of interactive, film and music professionals to Austin, Texas, to explore and test new innovations in marketing, technology and communications.

Much of the focus was on how to use the latest innovations for creating and distributing new albums or films. But the entertainment industry isn’t the only field that survives on buzz. At the beginning of the 2008 election cycle, the political world is also clamoring for what’s new in information gathering and dissemination. The question is whether campaigns will understand how to use these technologies to exceed their supporters’ online expectations. Here is a rundown of a few of the cutting-edge tools we can expect to see in the 2008 campaigns:

You can read the whole article here.

links for 2007-03-25

• My Fellow Americans: Pls Post a Comment!
  Social-networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace are among the latest media organizing tools of the political set.
• Google canvasses for political ads
  Dozens of political and advocacy group consultants crowded into a college lecture hall last week and listened intently to campaign tips from an unlikely source: three guys from Google.

My SXSW Coverage in ClickZ

I wrote an article for ClickZ…

Mobile Was the Message at South-by-Southwest Fest
By Brian Reich
ClickZ
March 23, 2007

Mobile was the medium everyone was buzzing about at the South-by-Southwest (SXSW) Interactive conference in Austin, Texas last week. Panelists speculated about the changes that the mobile platform would bring to movies, television, and video games. Meanwhile, vendors promoted functionality in hopes of getting their big ideas funded.

Much of the innovation discussed at SXSW was focused on the 1,400 bands, and online services supporting them, that were descending on Austin for the SXSW Music Festival, which followed the interactive event. The highest profile of those services was Mozes, which lets users create and manage text message-based mobile campaigns so brands, bands and fans can be connected. Fans can send messages to artists through Mozes, creating an interactive mobile community for each artist.
You can read the whole thing here.

links for 2007-03-17

• Candidates Try Web Video, And the Reviews Are Mixed
  One after another, presidential campaigns are adding videos to their Web sites as well as to video-sharing sites such as YouTube, MySpace and Veoh. The reviews, however, are mixed.
• Online Firms Boot Up for Political Campaigns
  From creating video games starring candidates to hosting virtual online campaign events, Internet companies see increasing opportunities in the business of politics.
• Blogs can top the presses
  Bloggers usedthe usual tools of good journalists everywhere — determination, insight, ingenuity — plus a powerful new force that was not available to reporters until blogging came along: the ability to communicate almost instantaneously with readers v

links for 2007-03-16

• Look, It’s Mii — on Wii!
  A feature on the Wii, called the Mii, which lets users create their own game characters using a selection of facial characteristics to appear on the screen, is sparking a creative frenzy.

links for 2007-03-14

• Linking Ancient and Modern, A Worldwide Web of Worship
  Christians, Muslims, Hindus, Jews, Buddhists, Sikhs and people of other faiths turn regularly to Web sites to pray, meditate and gather in “virtual” houses of worship graphically designed to look like the real thing.

SXSW Sessions 9 & 10: Quick Notes

My SXSW experience is coming to a close.  I haven’t had a chance to post notes and thoughts from the last few panels that I attended.  So, here are two quick summaries — with more to follow: 

The Rise of Blogebrity
‘Blogging celebrities’ have emerged legitimate media personalities with daily audiences equivalent to a cable show and the ability to drive mainstream interest – or kill it – with a couple of posts.  What makes a blogebrity? The panel (moderated by Kyle Bunch of Blogebrity, with Amanda Congdon from ABC News, Henry Copeland of Blogads, Karina Longworth of Netscape, Casey McKinnon of Galacticast and Nick Douglas of Look! Shiny!), which included some real-live blogebrity’s (side note: Amanda looks very different in person than she does online) said that the key to being famous on the web was not the size of your audience but your overall media savvy.  When you see bloggers on TV, writing books, being quoted in traditional press – that is when they transcend from online to having “full coverage.”

User Generated Content and Original Editorial: Friend or Foe
In the past few years, online media has embraced user generated content.  The volume and influence of user-generated content is growing and editors are trying to figure out how to integrate it effectively with original editorial content.  How can you do that?  The panel (Moderator Mike Tatum of CNET, Dave Snider of EnemyKite, Will Smith of Maximum PC Magazine, Scott Rafer of MyBlogLog, and Evan Williams of Obvious/Twitter) explained that the overall concept media must adopt is conversation.  The benefit is that the quality of the editorial gets better when your informed user base is contributing to the content.  Whether they are right or wrong, going through their arguments, reviewing their thought process helps us to think about better ways to do our own editorial job.  User generated folks can help to set the tone for the website, set the rules, find their niche and really explore it, etc.  The secret sauce is giving the top users, the most committed and insightful special access to editors, special recognition for their contribution, or something that will keep them engaged.  Additionally, while editors may be worried about bad contributions, the community very quickly will determine if someone is credible – through comments, or ratings, or similar.  When the audience figures out what they like or don’t and if someone who puts up bad information the community usually calls them out and corrects the mistakes.

SXSW Panel 8: Building a Fan Community

By Sunday afternoon I was beginning to wonder if the different panels I was sitting through were worth it.  But my perspective changed completely (for the better) when the building an online fan base panel started.  The focuse: using the internet and related technology to reach millions of fans without spending millions of dollars.  The panel (Scott Kirsner from CinemaTech moderated, Jim Miller of Brave New Foundation, Ian Schafer of Deep Focus, David Straus of Without A Box, Joe Swanberg – a filmmaker whose most recent movie is Hannah Takes the Stairs, and Lance Weiler of the Workbook Project) talked about how movies create and use MySpace pages and blogs during production, for promotion, and the role of user generated content and other activity online.

When asked what the secret was to generating online attention for movies was, like most panels, the answer to the question was “it depends” as in “it depends on the kind of movies you want to make,” or “it depends what kind of audience you want to reach” or “It depends if you have budget or not.”  The general consensus was that filmmakers and studios alike need to create immersive experiences that leverage their own dedicated channels for the movie and tap as many distribution paths and partners as possible.  And there were some interesting examples and case studies (Head Trauma and Clerks II chief among them). 

Here is a brain dump of my notes:

• MySpace is really good for connecting with people where the films are already online.  It is much harder to get someone to read about your film and then go out to a theater to watch.  If the movie is only a click away then they will be more likely to act.  Another opportunity to use social networks is to rally an audience locally (in advance of a screening or similar) to help with things like flyering.
• A consumer’s favorite film is most likely the film they haven’t seen yet. 
• The power for self-distribution is the ultimate power.  Very important to find the hook for a film/an idea and figure out how that is going to interest a certain audience and then go out to find that audience.
• The important thing is to let the right audience know why they should be interested in the film in the first place (before it is released, in some cases before it is even completed).  One of the things that social networks have allowed us to do is tap into these audiences and create a dialogue.  Social networks make spectacular audience relationship management tools.  It is one thing to build a community, let them congregate and exist on their own.  It is another thing to actually participate in that community or conversation.
• Being able to take your fan base from one film to the next is critical.  Start courting your fan base the day you start thinking about the next film you are going to make.

Closing thought: The most important thing is to make a good movie.  There is no process, no standardized set of tools that will work to promote a bad movie.  Success in building a fan base will take money and effort, time, and a little bit of luck.

SXSW Panel 7: Serious Games

Gaming is one of the fastest growing, most influential industries in the technology/entertainment space.  Most of the attention, naturally, goes towards entertainment games (first-person shooters, sports games, adventure games, etc.) because they bring in the big bucks.  But there is a whole other genre of games though that deserves all of our attention: serious games.

The panel (John Purdy of Red Knight Learning Systems, Lauren Davis of the Liemandt Foundation, Paul Medcalf of Blockdot (disclosure: I just finished working with Blockdot on the development of the LindtGoldBunny game) and Melinda Jackson of Enspire Learning) that SXSW pulled together had a lot of experience building serious games, but not a lot of insight to offer on why they work or how to make them effective.

What did they tell us?  Here is a quick brain dump from my notes:

• Serious games push an audience to learn something, or participate in some kind of engaging activity (even an engaging entertainment activity) and getting that player to the point where they are challenged, want to go back, want to be playing that game.  Of course, somewhere along the way, you learn something.  There are many different kinds of serious games: Education, Games for health, Games for change, Corporate, Military and government, Political, Healthcare, First responders and even Advergames.
• If a picture is worth a thousand words, animation is worth a thousand pictures, and a game is worth a thousand animations (i.e. a billion pictures)
• The ultimate goal is to provide a learning experience, but you have to entertain your audience if you want them to play.  You need to get that entertainment value, capitalize on the fun factor to get people in there to play (and ultimately learn).
• When a designer is putting together game components they are looking for the most addictive elements possible to engage someone.  The outcomes of a serious game are different however, because you have to make sure people learn the broader curriculum.  The game designer may have to make trade-offs and shelve something that would be more fun in favor of something that the game absolutely has to teach.  The ultimate goal is to balance them together.