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Do it right, or don’t do it at all (Associated Press, I’m looking at YOU)

Maybe the AP didn't save enough money on their car insurance.

Sorry – it’s been a busy week, but this one was too good to pass up. I got an invitation to internet-eavesdrop on a marketing conference presentation a few weeks ago that quickly devolved into “social media for corporate marketers”. The content wasn’t all that compelling (to be fair the presenters did a great job of re-tooling their session on the fly – clearly scrapping their prepared topics to cope with an audience that was less internet-savy than they’d expected). While most of the content afterwards wasn’t terribly interesting (what is “Twitter”? Should we be on “Twitter”? Why are our competitors on “Twitter”? How is “Twitter” different than “Myspace”… etc) they did do a good job of trying to hammer home the following key points:

  1. Being a social-media aware company does not mean you have to involve yourself in all aspects of social media.
  2. If you are going to work in the social media space you need to make sure your organization clearly understands what you are doing and why.
  3. You can not just pump press-releases out over social media outlets and expect positive results – you have to create compelling content for your target audience
  4. Badly implementing a social media presence is worse than not having one

A prime example of how points 2 and 4 can backfire is this latest story about how the Associated Press doesn’t seem to understand how it’s own YouTube channel works. I kind-of-sort-of commented on this particular post of Ricky Gervais and Elmo outtakes how bizarre it was that the Associated Press (a company known for sabre-rattling threats to on-line sites like Google (while at the same time accepting money from Google as a news content provider) had, of all things, a YouTube channel.

Clearly I’m not the only one whose head was blown by this dichotomy. The coles-notes version of the story is that Frank Strovel, an employee of Texas country radio station WTNQ ended up in a surreal discussion with the AP after he recieved a cease and desist letter for embedding AP YouTube content on the station’s website. The AP rep seemed flummoxed that such a channel existed, that embedding was clearly allowed and encouraged by the channel (it’s trivial to disable embedding codes with YouTube if the content provider wishes), and even that WTNQ was a AP affiliate to begin with.

Strovel: And we’re an A.P. affiliate for crying out loud! I stumped him on that one. . . . What is really shocking is that they were shocked that they’ve got a YouTube channel that people are embedding on their Websites. He seemed shocked by that. ‘Oh, I am going to have to look into that” is what he told me.

So here we have a textbook example of how not having the whole company in the loop is problematic. While the AP’s social media channel was generating legitimate goodwill (that Elmo/Gervais video was great, and lead to me alone having tonnes of “Wow, the AP’s starting to get the hang of what works on the internet” conversations) – they now have this – a rapidly mounting amount of mainstream press about how they clearly don’t have the foggiest clue what they’re doing. Not to mention slashdot, CNet and of course YouTube itself chiming in. Any building goodwill is forgotten and, again, the AP looks like an anacronysm desperately trying to protect a business model that has been outdated for much of the decade. They would have been better off having done nothing in the first place (not that would have changed the business model reality).

Take a lesson from your mothers people – any job worth doing, has to be done right… otherwise you can come off looking mighty silly. Especially in the social/new media space where reputation is the only currency of any import.

2009: The year we discovered 2001 was eerily prescient in 1968.

Just a quick little space/cinema mash-up today, starting with a cool video from over at New Scientist; Andrew Hamilton and Gavin Polhemus from the University of Colorado, Boulder, took Einstein’s general theory of relativity, and built a computer simulation of what it would look like if you fell into a black hole roughly the size of the one at the center of our galaxy:

Cool stuff on its own, but does it remind you of anything? Specifically the part after you’ve passed the Black Hole’s event horizon and are heading towards the singularity? Perhaps some particularly iconic bit of cinema? Like, say, this sequence:

I’m really not a particularly good scholar of “2001” (I’m on the record as being a bigger fan of Clarks “Childhood’s End”) but it wouldn’t suprise me one whit if the similarities between these two sequences are simply due to trying to graphically represent the same math, just with technology 50 years apart.

My apologies if that’s a little dense for a Friday (BLACK HOLE HUMOUR – HAR HAR HAR), if so – I cordially direct you to “The adorable leopard cubs who are best friends with a baby orangutan”.

And we’re back – with something cool.

I’m back from television-shooting purgatory (mostly) in one piece. Shooting at the CBC is always fascinating, last week (given the unusual surrounding circumstances) especially so.

An unexpected benefit of dropping off the map for a few days, I missed April 1st (a.k.a. “just lie about stuff on the internet day”) one of my most hated holidays (as someone who loves the fine craft of satire, pranks, and the ilk… an entire day of people mistaking “lying” for “satire” irks). Denis McGrath gets how it should be done. Glenn Hauman gets how it should be done (although I’m not sure his commentors do). 1957 BBC Writers got how it should be done. 99% of the internet? Doesn’t.

Not the point, the point (he said by way of wild segue) is that I get to welcome you back with this truly great bit of poster design:

the girlfriend experience

Soderbergh has had some great posters (and I agree with Sean Witzke that the poster for The Limey was a standout) but this? All kinds of fantastic, on all kinds of levels.

So there, back on a high note… what have you all been up to for the last couple of weeks?

(H/T to Sean Witzke via the always beaucoup Kevin Church)

The Sandwich Manifesto

scanwich

Things are going to be a little quiet through next week as I’m starting production on something for a few days. In the meantime, amuse yourself with scans of delicious sandwiches.

Food for thought (or comments, hint, hint). In this day and age of “gourmet” sandwich ingredients, is the concept of the sandwich itself obsolete? There’s a great local bakery which makes a roasted vegetable sandwich with five types of hand-roasted vegetables, smoked provolone, and a home made garlic aoli on thick fresh-baked bread. When I eat each element individually they are truly epicurean delights. When I eat the sandwich? I taste yams and lettuce, the two largest ingredients (by taste intensity and surface area respectively).

Yet, by prying my sandwich into it’s component parts it’s hardly a sandwich, it’s a salad with some bread on the side. The sandwich was borne of an era with ingredients of middling quality, where it’s delivery mechanism alone was unique. I certainly don’t think the sandwich is done, there’s still nothing to beat a pile of smoked meat on rye (maybe a little sauerkraut), but a graph correlating increasing number, or quality, of ingredients against “overall sandwich enjoyability” would be interesting. What is the critical mass of a sandwich?

I won’t be getting on that any time soon.

Discuss, and I’ll see y’all in a couple of days.

Mental Sorbet: Ricky Gervais and Elmo

That’s a lot of heavy depressing media reading for one week isn’t it? So, like a fine sorbet for your weekend, here’s Ricky Gervais and Elmo utterly losing their minds

(h/t to the Associated Press… because this is the Internet… and the Internet is becoming increasingly schizophrenic).

Hey Film and Television Friends, Are You Affected By The New CTF Rulings?

Here’s a great form letter I got today that does a very good job of detailing exactly why the CTF announcement should have everyone working in film and television extremely nervous. I’m trying to find the original author for attribution, although since it’s a “pass it on”, I’m sure they won’t mind my re-post. I left the content as-is, but did some re-formatting. Full post is after the jump, along with my $0.02 at the end. Read more

Have you ever wondered what a trillion dollars looks like?

trillion

The phrase gets bandied about a lot but I think this CGI mock-up of a trillion dollars (stacked on pallets in a warehouse) blew. my. mind.

(h/t Gizmodo)

CTF Snap Judgement

There was a big announcement by heritage minister James Moore this week about “streamlining the Canadian Television Fund and Canadian New Media Fund into a new “super-fund” in 2010.

I haven’t posted on it, as I haven’t had a lot of time to dig into the details, but my “snap judgement” is that the move is problematic (to say the least) on a number of fronts.

At it’s core, I think the concept of streamlining and consolodating Canada’s media and entertainment sector funding is not necesarrily a bad idea, but I think this move opens a number of really troubling areas:

1) The jury is out on how exactly the “smaller independant” board will be constituted, but it seems safe at this time that broadcasters will have a much larger voice in that board, which is almost entirely the opposite of what those lobbying for an “independant” board wanted, for obvious reasons.

2) Opening the fund up to broadcaster-owned producers is a really sticky wicket. I don’t mean this to be rude, or a muckraker, or impugn the excellent work done by many of my friends and co-workers – but the goal of a large segment of broadcaster owned production is to fill as many content hours as cheaply as possible. Developing programming from that goal is almost diametrically at odds with what the fund was created to do, which was foster high quality content with large economic impact, high visibility, and export potential. Just the increase in volume alone is troubling givin the vast oversubscription to the old CTF.

and the big one

3) From the article: “The fund will favour projects produced in high-definition and require applicants to design their projects across a minimum of two distribution platforms, including television.”

(Sigh)

I will get into this at length another day but the increase in popularity of “new media”, and the rise of “digital convergence” does not mean that you re-purpose material across several platforms. If we have learned anything about the changing media landscape in the past decade it’s that consumers consume different types of material in different ways across platforms. The material I watch on my iPod (and how and when I watch it) is not the same as the material I watch on my tv, nor in a movie theatre, nor on my computer. When you require producers to attempt to leverage their productions across multiple platforms, you are nearly guaranteeing that they will fail in one (and possibly both) of them. Requiring that applicants to a new media fund also be working their project in film or television, makes about as much sense as requiring applicants to a book publishing fund to have recorded a hit single, or applicants to an arts grant being able to run a 4-minute mile. Tying everything together does not foster excellence anywhere – it makes it more likely that projects will fail, and it mandates mediocrity (and underperformance) across the board.