internet cool?!

Otherwise titled:
If you’re going to a Cage Match, bring a Wrestler.

Otherwise titled:
King Kong Bundy + Social Media Week = #smwSMACKDOWN.

You may have heard a thing or to about The Social Media Week Cage Match I was involved in yesterday. In it, two teams of Social Strategy Experts (whatever that means) were asked to square off and compete on a panel by bringing strategic recommendations to 4 real-world brand-related Social PR problems in need of a good strategy and timeline for remediation..  (I’ll post a link to the case studies later today, sorry!).

Easy enough. But was baffling me was the amount of Buzz Word Bingo and Rhetoric flying around rather than practical, substantive, innovative thinking. If you follow my stream, you probably know by now I have little patience for this kind of—ahem—addouchery. It gets in the way of solving real problems, and frankly makes you sound pretty silly. So I asked my friend King Kong Bundy to come along to said Social Media Cage Match and put the #smwSMACKDOWN on anyone who got out of line. 

Dear brands, nerds, social strategy experts, agency types and people of the diginet:

Your next magical social strategy has little to do with what you execute IN social media, but rather what you do OUTSIDE of it (online or otherwise)!

The web is a mirror. A mirror that celebrates what you DO. Not what you SAY. 

It imitates what people are doing and saying because it’s made up of, well, PEOPLE. Do something interesting and relevant to your target and social channels instantly becomes the place people congregate discuss, promote, applaud, and despise what you ve done.

“Twitter solutions”, “Facebook ideas” and “Influencer Strategies” Oh my! 

Blech. Social media is all too often viewed and talked about with only hyper-focus on the tools we use within it. Yes you need a “social media plan” full of “influencer programs” and “tactics that engage your target” but for the love of God, those words are no better than the Buzzword Junkie you sound like if they’re not part of an integrated approach. Execute a “Twitter Strategy” in a vacuum and you’re likely to be sitting there staring at over zealous fellow Tweeters (not your target)—or worse—an empty stream.

You want to get social? Then you better bring a gun to a gunfight…err…Wrestler to a Wrestling match. And it might not hurt if you put a tshirt on him with #smwSMACKDOWN either.

Do something relevant for your target worth talking about. That is all.

Remember what it was like to meet people before Facepants? You know, with coffee and high-fives and fist-bumps and shit?  

Meet Meet Joe. A new, low-tech alternative to Facebook and its ilk that requires no online profile but relies on personal introductions instead.

Serving the Chicago area, Meet Joe focuses on introducing people to new friends based on their interests and the kinds of people they want to meet. Users begin by signing up with the service online—that may actually be the last time they use its website. From there, Joe Drake, the company’s founder, will contact them personally via email to set up a confidential meeting over coffee or a drink. Based on their description of who they’re hoping to find, Joe will then coordinate an opportunity for them to meet someone or a small group of people—he’ll even help coordinate schedules and recommend an activity based on everyone’s personalities, interests and preferences. Joe! That’s rad! Looking for someone to start a NY outpost? :)

from the site

“Joe is like a great tailor or a trusted real estate agent, but he doesn’t have an assistant and he never takes a day off. You’ll be able to reach him by email, phone, text, or instant message within 24 hours unless he is in jail, a coma, or the world is ending.”

The price of a personal consultation and one meeting with potential friends is USD 29.

Holy Mother of Awesome. Meet CloudContacts.

You send them that stack of business cards you are collecting in a box and they scan them. THEN they connect each card with social networks and backing it all up on a cloud server so you can always get to your contact information.

Here’s an interview with Allen Stern (the guy behind CloudContacts), from CenterNetworks in New York. He tells us how he does it, and even spends some time talking about the latest web stuff, too. Nerdy!

Having a virtual personality and social network online is as important for todays and especially tomorrows Netcitizen as having a physical presents in this world. The line between online and offline is getting blurred with todays communication tools that allow us to stay connected almost everywhere, anytime.

Meet the “clickable” dress.

Nadya Peek, an MIT Media Lab student, created a unique interactive dress to close the gap between our presents in the physical and virtual world. Her project Caché aims to bring interactivity, a virtual poke into the physical presents via clothing.

And it’s awesome.

But how cool would it be if you rigged up a lil’ arduino in there and automatically posted a Tweet or a “Poke” to the person on Spacebook or MyFace just by touching them. Ok, now I’m just crazy. Enjoi!

Meet Tweenbots - A nerdy and fun project of an ITP student in NYC. Tweenbots are human-dependent robots that navigate the city with the help of pedestrians they encounter. Rolling at a constant speed, in a straight line, Tweenbots have a destination displayed on a flag, and rely on people they meet to read this flag and to aim them in the right direction to reach their goal.

from the site:

In New York, we are very occupied with getting from one place to another. I wondered: could a human-like object traverse sidewalks and streets along with us, and in so doing, create a narrative about our relationship to space and our willingness to interact with what we find in it? More importantly, how could our actions be seen within a larger context of human connection that emerges from the complexity of the city itself? To answer these questions, I built robots.<p>

Given their extreme vulnerability, the vastness of city space, the dangers posed by traffic, suspicion of terrorism, and the possibility that no one would be interested in helping a lost little robot, I initially conceived the Tweenbots as disposable creatures which were more likely to struggle and die in the city than to reach their destination. Because I built them with minimal technology, I had no way of tracking the Tweenbot’s progress, and so I set out on the first test with a video camera hidden in my purse. I placed the Tweenbot down on the sidewalk, and walked far enough away that I would not be observed as the Tweenbot––a smiling 10-inch tall cardboard missionary––bumped along towards his inevitable fate.

The results were unexpected. Over the course of the following months, throughout numerous missions, the Tweenbots were successful in rolling from their start point to their far-away destination assisted only by strangers. Every time the robot got caught under a park bench, ground futilely against a curb, or became trapped in a pothole, some passerby would always rescue it and send it toward its goal. Never once was a Tweenbot lost or damaged. Often, people would ignore the instructions to aim the Tweenbot in the “right” direction, if that direction meant sending the robot into a perilous situation. One man turned the robot back in the direction from which it had just come, saying out loud to the Tweenbot, “You can’t go that way, it’s toward the road.”

The Tweenbot’s unexpected presence in the city created an unfolding narrative that spoke not simply to the vastness of city space and to the journey of a human-assisted robot, but also to the power of a simple technological object to create a complex network powered by human intelligence and asynchronous interactions. But of more interest to me was the fact that this ad-hoc crowdsourcing was driven primarily by human empathy for an anthropomorphized object. The journey the Tweenbots take each time they are released in the city becomes a story of people’s willingness to engage with a creature that mirrors human characteristics of vulnerability, of being lost, and of having intention without the means of achieving its goal alone. As each encounter with a helpful pedestrian takes the robot one step closer to attaining it’s destination, the significance of our random discoveries and individual actions accumulates into a story about a vast space made small by an even smaller robot.

for a sneak peek at more robots (coming soon) look here.

What better way to advertise Killzone, than to just let the target play the game? Awesome. Install the Killzone toolbar for your browser (Firefox v3 recommended or IE6/7) and as you browse your favorite webbasites you’ll get ambushed and thrown right into a battle scene.

Like I said, Awesome.