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Two cool things about the Samsung Instinct campaign site that encourages people to drop an image of the phone into their home videos: the refreshing honesty and this direct YouTube uploader that connects the users directly to their already uploaded videos.
In a nutshell, it's a 3d chat app where users can customize avatars and create environments (rooms) with stuff they pick from a product catalog. You need to install a browser (FF, IE, Win-only) plug-in to participate. And while it is not exactly an MMO, it is more similar to Second Life than early commentators admit.
First impressions:
1. While object creation is a process open only to participants hand-picked by Google (see a press release by Rivers Run Red, a creator of Second Life presence for many companies), Lively seems designed to be integrated with SketchUp and 3D Warehouse at some point. This would open doors not only to user-generated stuff, but also to branded objects (such as virtual Whirlpool appliances).
Rivers Run Red has a room in Lively, and so does Linden Lab.
2. While all of the stuff I've seen in the catalog is free, the very fact that there's a price tag at all hints at a potential marketplace for virtual stuff.
3. The integration with the "flat" web is pretty tight. Each room has a "real" URL (here's Google's), each room can be embedded on other sites (and viewable with the plug-in), some objects can play YouTube videos and show pictures hosted elsewhere.
4. Characters can be equipped with animation scripts.
5. Similarly to Second Life, Lively allows movement around the environment and camera manipulation, and like in Second Life, the controls are not terribly intuitive.
6. Objects can be fitted with hyperlinks to "flat" web pages, just like the lava lamp on the screen cap below pointing to AdLab. This could probably result in some sort of on-the-spot transactional activity: you click on the lamp in my room and a window pops up offering you to buy the real thing.
7. There are half-rumors half-expectations that Lively will be somehow integrated into Orkut, which seems possible since Lively uses the same system-wide Google login.
Lively, of course, will become more, well, lively when Google integrates it with SketchUp and allows user- and brand-generated assets to become part of the marketplace. It could also be hypothetically integrated with Google Earth so that Lively "rooms" become inhabitable interiors of the 3D models on Earth or maybe in the sky.
A lof ot related links from AdLab's past years here, so I'll just give a couple of broad pointers:
Google and virtual worlds
Virtual worlds in general
Posts related to Second Life
Advertising in games
"Corporate builds are sprawling virtual landscapes that distribute users throughout multiple locations of activity. Visitors to corporate builds were likely to interact with the content alone or with one or two friends. In contrast, user builds focus visitor activity into a few key areas. As a percent of overall land, user-created builds devote 40% less space to dedicated social areas, such as clubs and dance floors, than corporate builds. The limited social space in user-created builds encourages residents to collect into more densely populated and socially active areas, discouraging resident sprawl. Visitors to user-generated builds were more likely to be in groups of 10, 20, or even more. Second Life is ultimately a social world; social interaction is the primary activity among its users, so spreading users apart amongst well-produced buildings, spaces, and activities is self-defeating."
Magazine buying may get an Internet-era makeover in September when Time Inc. launches Maghound, a service that promises to blend the convenience of subscriptions with the flexibility of newsstand sales. Customers will pay a monthly fee for home delivery of the publications they want. But unlike with subscriptions, which typically run for fixed terms, users can go online and swap one title for another whenever they want. "It's a great concept," says Patrick Taylor, spokesman for Meredith, which publishes Better Homes and Gardens and Ladies' Home Journal. "We're always looking for innovative ways to test our magazines with readers." Users will pay about $5 a month for three magazines, $8 for five, $10 for seven and $1 for each additional. About 10% of titles, including some weeklies, will cost more.I'm not sure it saves money in the long run considering that many magazine subscriptions are pretty cheap, but still, this could juice up the magazine biz. A broad range of titles will likely be available. Would you sign up for this?
This one is too good to be true - a pal tips us to a "direct mail that bombed " (pun!)
The ticking noise that brought a bomb squad to a Carmel Valley medical building Monday turned out to be a small battery in a greeting card.
The card, from a pharmaceutical company promoting its products, said "Your time is up" on the cover, San Diego fire spokesman Maurice Luque said.
A receptionist at Children's Medical Group office in the three-story building on El Camino Real heard ticking coming from a mailbox in the hallway about 4 p.m. She called 911 and security officers evacuated the building.
HA! You'd think they'd learn after a few 'bomb scares' as ads, like the LED billboards for Adult Swim which caused havoc in Boston last year. When are you US ad folks going to learn? Everything changed after "9/11", man. Nobody has a sense of humor anymore (but somebody knows who mailed the anthrax - do you?)
Coincidentally, I’ve been hit with a pretty singular view of the concept of engagement on a number of occasions this week, so I thought I would take it up myself.
The riff running through all of the conversations is that numbers are not the point in marketing, it’s the quality of the numbers that count, the engagement that counts, the level of the conversation that counts if one is to measure the success of one marketing effort or the importance of one blog over another. Don’t get me wrong, I’m huge on engagement, but engagement without velocity is a lot more work. Sometimes the seemingly seedy, or is it bogus, task of building velocity is what really stops people from building much engagement.
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Okay, here are some posts that got me started on this:
- Three Statistics that Lie
- Are RSS Subscriber Numbers Bogus
Both of these stories, and the resulting comment fest, come at the about the same point from somewhat different angles - are big numbers, particularly numbers that are hard to gauge, like RSS subscribers, important if those numbers are not engaged. (FYI: Duct Tape Marketing does have big RSS numbers inflated somewhat by the fact that some RSS services like Google Reader bundle my blog automatically for people who choose the small business option.)
The problem I wrestle with in this argument is that it must start with the supposition thats every blogger and social media player has the very same goal. Remember marketing is about ROI and long-term results, whatever you deem they be. With that in mind, there’s no play book for what’s more effective or even how to measure what’s right or more valuable. (There certainly are rules for what’s right and wrong, but that’s not what we are talking about.)
What matters always, always is the completion of meaningful long term strategic objectives. So, the discussion of who’s blog readers are more engaged or if 500 hyper engaged readers is better than 50,000 kinda engaged readers somehow starts sounding a bit like the discussion of the best college football team every year. Until there’s a playoff, and everyone has the same goal, the discussion is silly.
From my perspective, a sale is a really big measure, a media mention is big measure, engagement is a big measure, people contacting me in hopes that I might feature their book or product is a big measure, getting a Google search term on page one is a big measure, the attention of an advertiser is a big measure, a really smart person agreeing to be a guest on my podcast is a big measure, many of these goals are achieved by working really hard to build things that can’t always be quantified scientifically, things that build velocity, such as Diggs, Facebook friends, saves to Google, StumbleUpon traffic, Twitter followers, RSS subscribers, and comments.
The point is that in the old world of marketing you simply couldn’t afford to pursue tactics that didn’t produce great ROI, in the new world of marketing you can often very easily afford to throw some things, on message, in the direction of tactics that might not produce one result, but just might, just maybe produce another, if you were actually able to measure it. Integration, velocity, opportunity and brand are the go words for me.
And just to make this entire thing muddier:
Storytelling ROI: Social Engagement Metrics for Bloggers (Interesting metric of engagement from AideRSS)
Web spoofs made easy! Open up any page, then copy the line of code below in the browser's address field. This makes the page "editable" locally so you can modify its content like you would in a text editor.
javascript:document.body.contentEditable='true'; document.designMode='on'; void 0Besides its obvious entertainment value, this little experiment shows how easy web editing and publishing should really be.
-- around the web, but specifically from BlogStorm
