All this web stuff is kind of fleeting

I wrote a post for Voce Nation the other day that talked about Facebook’s buying of Friendfeed and the imminent shut-down (now apparently delayed) of Tr.im that tied the two together to show just how impermanent the web services we use really and truly are. Also hitting the same subject is Marshall Kirkpatrick at R/WW and his piece is definitely worth a read.

While all of this discussion is more than a little “inside baseball” for the general audience, the point of it all is to point out that while there are a ton of people out there who promise to show you the secrets of this that or the other thing, very little of it is permanent. And more than that, what exists today is bound to be competing against what’s two or five or however many years down the road with other things we haven’t even thought of.

Just keep that in mind before you rush out to buy the “Friendfeed for Dummies” book or things like it.

Twitter policies making news

(Ed. Note: I wrote this, sat on it while I considered it and, while I was doing that, Biro wrote essentially the same thing for PRWeek. That’s what I get for 1) Having smart friends and 2) sitting on my hinder. –Chris)

Everyone’s talking about corporate Twitter (and larger social networking) policies the last 24 hours so let’s see where we are in the conversation right now.

The U.S. Marine Corps has banned for one year access to Twitter, MySpace, Facebook and other social networks out of a fear that they could open up the military network to threats of information exposure.

ESPN has been catching (unduly, I think) flack for reports about a policy that many thought would limit employee tweets to only those that serve ESPN business needs. Turns out it’s a bit more complicated than that (isn’t it always?) and that there was some language in their memo that might have been overly restrictive, but they wanted to make sure people weren’t talking out of line about sports related news and topics, an area that directly impacts ESPN’s business.

Finally, Izea has launched a Sponsored Tweets business to connect advertisers with people with a sizable and targeted Twitter following. The only thing surprising about this is that it took so long to get officially rolled out since there have been one-off experiments along these lines for the last year or so by other players and companies.

Twitter keeps growing and has redesigned its homepage not only to emphasize search (the area everyone keeps focusing on as we run toward real-time information and it’s refreshing lack of context) but to give first-time visitors a better idea of what’s going on and convert more folks into consistent users. The company even launched a Twitter 101 guide for businesses looking to get the most out of the service.

While a guide like this is great, it’s still up to each and every user – whether personal or corporate – to suss out for itself how it’s going to best use Twitter and what it’s specific employee guidelines are going to be.

And that’s where I’m going to go ahead and disagree with much of the “sigh” and “they’re wrong” commentary about both the Marine Corps and ESPN. I get the thinking behind the military not wanting to unnecessarily expose its network to attacks. If there’s one industry I think is right for not wanting to take any more risks than it absolutely has to, it’s that one. There’s probably a work-around – I’ve heard reports they’re looking into offering computers that aren’t connected to the rest of the network that soldiers could use – and they’ll probably find it.

ESPN, for its part, has clarified its policy a bit and made it clear it simply wants to make sure employees aren’t crossing any lines that shouldn’t be crossed. We can debate these but they’re not inherently or overtly “bad” as some people have labeled them.

It’s important to remember that, despite the hype and despite the length of time that some people have been using it, Twitter is still relatively new. So companies and working on how to integrate it into their overall communications plans (indeed the best ones are part of a bigger plan and not just one-off efforts). But the best policies are also worked out in conjunction with employees and are part of a good *internal* communications plan, as I’ve previously stated.

So Twitter, blog and other social media guidelines are dependent on both internal and external communications. Companies have to have a dialogue established with employees. That last part is often – wrongly – overlooked when hashing these things out, a process that can take time and may not wind up in the same place it starts out in and should certainly be open to evolving over time.

The new media model

I’ve long maintained (I think I’ve been saying this since 2004) that newspaper’s major failing online – outside of not linking out, starting out with pay walls and such – was that it didn’t realize there were people within the community that would gladly write for them for nothing or almost nothing, just the giddy feeling of contributing to a blog on the newspaper’s website or some other form of social currency. I felt that if they had reached out to people in the community who were starting their own blogs and said “Hey, let’s integrate your stuff into the paper’s website – you get exposure (and maybe a cut of the ad revenue) and we get some niche-focused content under our brand umbrella” we’d be looking at a very different media picture than we are right now.

That’s why I’m such a fan of ChicagoNow, because it basically does just that. The site is not so much a single publication so much as it is a collection of blogs, ranging from newly launched ones to existing properties like CTA Tattler and others that existed before but now have been brought in-house. You can read about happenings in the legal community, follow a Naperville woman’s travels in Iran, find out how to maintain a garden in the city and explore a bunch of other very niche content.

And that’s the genius of it. It’s a broad site with 74 bits of niche appeal. And that’s exactly what a media property should be. Don’t try to be all things to all people and reach everyone with all the content you produce. That’s not going to happen. Instead be all things by offering a single point of content that will appeal to *that* person. Reach me. Get my interest.

This isn’t “aggregation” in the way that the term has come to be understood thanks to HuffPo where an original story is rewritten with a cursory link that no one follows thrown in at the end. This is “aggregation” in the “Hey, that’s a cool blog that fills a gap in our current offerings. Wanna write for us?” sense and that’s much more sustainable and a much better way to embrace and be recognized by the community. ChicagoNow could conceivably bring in all sorts of stuff and all of it would fit.

The site is now out of beta which is why this is on my mind. Good luck to everyone involved here.

Champlin exits Chicago

I’m a big fan of the band Chicago and have been since the late 1980′s, with “19″ being the first album of theirs that I bought. Eventually I would continue buying the new ones and slowing filling in the gap of previous records. My fandom of the band was a direct result of hearing songs like “Look Away” and “You’re Not Alone” on the radio and seeing the videos (awful in retrospect) in heavy rotation on MTV and VH1. As such I became a huge fan not only of the band in general – all the “eras” and sounds have upsides and downsides – but of Bill Champlin in particular.

Champlin joined the group in 1982 with “16″ and helped push the band back into popularity with his multi-instrumental capabilities and gruff, soulful voice that contrasted but blended with first Peter Cetera and then Jason Scheff’s high tenor vocals.

Which is why I’m bummed to hear that Champlin is leaving the band. Not only that, he’s doing so abruptly, in the middle of a tour with Earth, Wind and Fire. It’s hard not to have seen this coming, though.

While Champlin has been a prominent presence on the band’s limited album output since 1991 there are probably (and this is just fan speculation) a number of things that went into this.

First is the stated reason: He has a new solo album coming out and is feeling a renewed call to make that sort of music and then launch limited, intimate tours in support of them.

Second is that limited Chicago output. Since 1991′s “Twenty-1″ the band has put out a big-band cover disc, an album of Christmas music and only two original albums: “XXX” in 2006 and, finally, “Stone of Sisyphus,” which was originally recorded in 1992 and shelved until if eventually got an official release in 2008.

Third has to be the fact that, despite the fact that he was already a respected musician and arranger before he joined the band and was then with the band for 27 years he was still considered “the new guy.” He was rarely, if ever, the “voice” of the band in the press and got little to no screen time in appearances on TV shows and such. The camera rarely wandered back to the guy, who was plugging away on his B-3 and making the music better.

Fourth, I have to believe the grind of the same music on the same tour year after year finally caught up to him. He looked, as the years wore on, like the moments he was enjoying most were the smaller things he was doing in the music, the little flourishes he added with his organ or guitar.

Whatever the case, it’s hard to imagine this isn’t the beginning of the end for the band. They announced a replacement for Champlin that will finish the tour in his stead but…what’s the long term thinking here? How do they replace him going forward, or do they? More importantly, how is his re-dedication to his own music going to influence Scheff and Howland, both of whom are still younger and who might want to get going on more records of their own, all of which comes at the expense of Chicago.

Experiment Tracking #2

Second Monday of my great Media Experiment, where I try to get a sense of how much ad revenue I’m sending – according to Bit.ly trackable link stats – to media properties that keep talking about erecting pay walls because of all of us nasty bloggers.

These numbers are for 7/28 – 8/7.

• Links Shared: 48
• Click: 430
• Ad revenue at $50 CPM ($.05/click): $21.50
• Ad revenue at $30 CPM ($.03/click): $12.90

So if Steven Brill wants to charge $10 a month for me to access a coalition of newspapers and magazines, I’ve at least paid for one month if not two.

Marvel Villain of the Day: Dr. Doom

The Summer of Connelly

In the wake of the sad news that writer/director John Hughes passed away suddenly at age 59 (which, if you do the math, means he was in his early to mid 30′s when he was creating all those classic teenage-angst movies) a lot of people have been talking about what his movies meant to them. Many are picking some combination of The Trilogy – Pretty in Pink/Sixteen Candles/The Breakfast Club – but every now and again there’s a left-field pick. Such is the case with the MTV Movie Blog writing about their appreciation of Career Opportunities, which has Frank Whaley and Jennifer Connelly stuck in a Target all night and falling in love in the process.

They, as any guy who was in his teens when that movie came out in 1991 would do, uses a picture of Connelly riding a mechanical horse in the movie, as a picture in the post.

It’s important to remember, though, that not only did Connelly straddle that toy horse into our conscious in 1991 but that was also the year The Rocketeer came out. Say “Jennifer Connely in The Rocketeer” to any guy aged 30 to 40 and this is the image that comes to mind.

(Not the best pic, but the best I could find.)

So, you know, 1991 was a good year for Jennifer Connelly.

Marvel Villian of the Day: Bullseye

Certified

About a week and a half after blogging went “mainstream” there started being discussions of blogging ethics guidelines, discussions that – rightly or wrongly – have never really gone anywhere for a variety of reasons.

Now, though, there’s a stab at this kind of thing from within a niche that’s been under more than a little scrutiny lately: Mommy bloggers.

Nearly 300 such bloggers have already signed a pledge on Blog With Integrity to fully disclose when the get review material, if they’ve been compensated for a post and other instances where business dealings are impacting the content on the site. Likewise they’re promising to draw a clear line between advertising and editorial content.

The main idea of the group campaign seems to be to get out in front of the issue and show the FTC – which is pondering stricter guidelines for disclosure on blogs than are in place for mainstream media and which says it’s trying to get these in place before year’s end – that the community members can police themselves.

Just like the more general blogging ethics guidelines this is a great idea. But it doesn’t change the fact that while there are things each writer should absolutely be doing regarding transparency and such there are also actions marketers should – or shouldn’t – be doing to keep up their end of the bargain. The industry can’t create an environment where paid posts are an excepted practice and then throw up their collective hands when it comes to potential Federal guidelines and say it’s up to the bloggers.

Unfortunately it also hits the same roadblocks that more general idea ran up against, the lack of a central oversight and enforcement body being only the first one.

Even so it’s a good move by a group that’s trying to reframe the discussion and start some positive movement forward.

Movie Marketing Madness: Cold Souls

What is the soul? We all claim to have one in the spiritual sense and yet there’s nothing that can be pointed to, nothing that can be examined after our death that is “the soul.”

Cold Souls does, though, make the soul a physical thing. The movie focuses around an actor named Paul Giamatti, played by Paul Giamatti, who one day decides that in order to fully prepare for a role in “Uncle Vanya, he needs to get rid of his soul. So he enlists the services of a company that will remove and store that soul. But he finds that it’s not quite as simple as that, as being without his soul winds up having more of an impact than he anticipated. Plus there’s also the annoyance of his stored soul winding up being missing when he goes to retrieve it.

If it sounds very meta it is. It’s not that Giamatti is playing himself, it’s that he’s playing the role of a movie actor named Paul Giamatti. And yes, its exploration of what the soul is and what role it plays in our lives is very much an examination of what motivates us and makes us who we are. It’s drawing a lot of comparisons to Being JohnMalkovich and, quite frankly, rightfully so. It’s a bit different in execution but looks like it mines similar ground in terms of philosophical explorations.

The Posters

The movie’s one poster made it clear, more or less, what the movie was going to be about and what the major selling point is. It showsGiamatti sitting in the middle of the poster, the tiniest of a series of nesting dolls that expands to be his head. So he’s sitting inside of his own head, an image that comes as close as I think it’s possible to explaining the plot of the movie.

The way the image hints at some sort of metaphysical storyline and the inclusion of Giamatti means the poster was designed specifically for fans of independent, story-driven movies. Which is good because that’s who the movie is aimed at. So it’s not a matter of attracting them to the movie – awareness (as we’ll talk about below) in this crowd is already likely to be pretty high. So all the studio has to do is not screw it up and I think this poster achieves that goal of not failing.

The Trailers

The trailer starts off by introducing us to Paul Giamatti and the circumstance he finds himself in, unable to break through some sort of mental or psychological block and fully commit to a role in a play he’s doing. He feels stuck…weighed down…like he can’t get out of a rut or something. But then we see him read a story about a company that removes souls and he visits said company.

That goes by pretty fast before we’re shown soulless Giamatti, who’s having his own set of problems. He’s acting weird is acting differently around his wife. So he decides to have his soul reinstated, only to find out it’s been stolen from storage and is probably in Russia somewhere on the black market.

If you are at all interested in independent or offbeat film you’re going to attracted to this trailer like gnats to my forehead when I’m cutting the grass. An existential examination of the soul with a greatly respected actor in this area playing a fictionalized version of himself. It’s pretty funny to seeGiamatti playing this part and the entire thing winds up looking very interesting and certainly will be viewed as a serious-minded bit of counter-programming against G. I. Joe.

Online

The official website is, even for a smaller movie, pretty small and sparse on the content front. After you continue on from the trailer that starts off on the main page, you get taken to the “About” page. There you’ll find a decent Synopsis of the movie’s plot as well as a Writer/Director Statement that’s written by Sophie Barthes and which explains more clearly than most production notes do, why she created the story and what she was trying to say with it.

“Video” has the movie’s trailer as well as three clips from the film that fill in some of the plot points.

“Cast & Crew” has profiles of the film’s major players and, in the case of the cast, three pictures of each actor taken from the film. It’s unfortunate, though, that those pictures aren’tdownloadable.

“Press” just gives you a link to download the PDF version of the press notes.

There’s also a Facebook page for the movie that contains the marketing collateral as well as news about the film’s publicity campaign. The MySpace page is mainly just the trailer, some photos and little else. The Samuel Goldwyn YouTube page has the trailer and a handful of clips.

The online campaign also included the extending of The Soul Storage Company, the corporation depicted in the movie, being given its own website, Twitter profile, Facebook page and even a mock-up of an ad that would appear in The Village Voice. This is fun, even if it’s not the most fully fleshed out effort. The company’s site even has a tool that lets you get rid of your soul online that’s kind of neat, especially since you can post the results to Twitter or Facebook.

My Soul

Apparently the company even did some other advertising in the weeks leading up to release.

Advertising and Cross-Promotions

Not much on either front, at least not that I’ve seen. I may have come across a couple of web ads for the movie but it’s not the kind of thing that’s going to attract a ton of promotional partners and I’m guessing the paid media budget wasn’t that big so instead it relied greatly on earned media.

Media and Publicity

Much of the publicity and buzz for the movie came out of its debut at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, where it was generally well regarded by critics and other writers. It then went on to appear at later film festivals and continued to accumulate positive word-of-mouth from those appearances, as well as from other pre-release screenings that brought with them word-of-mouth.

There were a generous amount of clips released, including this batch of seven varied scenes that show Giamatti as Giamatti preparing for his soul to be removed, reacting to the process and then going on his journey to find the mis-placed soul.

There was also a decent publicity campaign for the film, as evidenced by the links shared on its Facebook page. The main thrust of that was, unsurprisingly, spearheaded by Giamatti who was interviewed by more than a few publications ranging from FilmThreat to The New Yorker and more.

Overall

It’s a nice little campaign that plays to its strengths – Giamatti’s performance and the pretty high-minded but funny concept – nicely. Everything here is designed to appeal to fans of movies you actually have to pay attention to in order to enjoy and so should work well in moving those folks to action.

Unfortunately (but not surprisingly) the movie is only opening this weekend in New York and LA and then expanding to the rest of the country over the remainder of August. So the movie’s campaign will have to continue working throughout that period to let people in the secondary markets know it’s finally reached them.

PICKING UP THE SPARE

• 8/7/09: While a number of movies’ campaigns are cited, the Soul Storage Company effort for Cold Souls is the lynch-pin of this AdAge article about the decade long history of “viral” campaigns online in support of films.