Wikipedia never ceases to amaze me. It has fundamentally changed the world. Together with Google, Wikipedia has changed the process of finding information: Type what you are looking for into Google and chances are you will end up at Wikipedia.

I particularly like how this little visualization came about, as the author explains: 

I was listening to writer Clay Shirky talk about cognitive surplus – the idea of spare brainpower in the world’s collective mind just sitting there waiting, wanting, to be harnessed. He had a stand-out statistic that snagged my mind. I thought I would visualise it.

I don't understand why more complex organizations don't try to emulate Wikipedia. They organize information in blogs and decks, and via press releases and archived email. This wasn't intuitive before, and it's even less so in the post-Wikipedia world we live in. An entire generation will enter the workforce in the near future and the "search + wiki" model is the way they have always found information.

Is it really social when a computer determines what to show you? We are seeing more and more aggregators. More and more services and applications that pull in feeds and data from all everywhere and present it in a linear format. I get it. I use Google Reader every day. That's how I found this article. That's how I find most things.

But when you take Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, etc. and aggregate all the streams together, doesn't it defeat the purpose? Look at how the Newsfeed on Facebook now works. You no longer have to say anything to anyone, you can simply talk into the ether and Facebook goes out and tries to find the people most interested in what you have to say. Is that even really social media? Why not go all the way and just have bots respond to your posts? Would anyone even know? Would anyone even care?

I hate Forrester. Let me say that again: I hate Forrester. This article on ReadWriteWeb is a great example why. They love to say things like, "You're measuring social media wrong," and then they present an equally wrong solution—and this feels like a recurring theme in their reports.

At some point you realize that measuring ROI for things like social media is too complicated to fit into a small chart. You can't just make up numbers and throw them into simple equations. Here's a tip: If you really want to measure the effectiveness of a social media campaign, hire a statistician. Hire that person before you begin planning the campaign, because it can be measured. Is it difficult? Sure, but it's possible with a bit of planning. The harsh truth is that most agencies don't want to know if their work actually moved the needle, since they will say it did either way. I'm guilty of this myself. But if anyone is going to win in social media, and I mean really win, they are going to start measuring things properly—the way we do for everything else. Otherwise clients will just bounce from shop to shop, from buzzword to buzzword, flavor of the week, month, etc..

I also hate when Forrester ends on a note like this, as they often do:

Many marketing investments are not intended to furnish immediate financial results but instead create long-term brand value. The greatest and most valuable brands weren't created in one quarter to the next but with an eye toward building lasting relationships with customers.

That seems to me like a cop-out. Good marketing should result in measurable financial results. If it doesn't, then it probably wasn't that good—and that's okay—but let's not pretend like "created long-term brand value" should be used to cover up bad advertising. After all, if you are creating long term-brand value that should be measurable too, just in a future time period.

Has there ever been a more dramatic example of the right and wrong of how to do social media campaigns than what we’ve seen in the last week?

Two campaigns, one great, one not so much

First we had Fast Company’s “Influence Project”, which has been nearly unanimously panned as exactly the wrong way to “measure influence”, which was of course, the entire aim of the campaign.

Then yesterday, we broke open the story about a social media campaign that will very likely go down as one of the best ever (results directly from the agency behind the campaign below)- the shirtless Old Spice guy responding hilariously to just about anybody through a personalized video. Both very well known brands; one doing social media oh so wrong, the other oh so right.

We’re not going to focus on the negative here (i.e. The Influence Project), first of all, because a number of high quality articles have already been written about it, and second, because negative is boring. To make a long story short, it was done nearly entirely wrong, and it completely backfired into a very negative meme for Fast Company. If you’d like to disagree with this, please let us know in the comments and we can have a debate.

So let’s talk about this amazing Old Spice campaign.

I couldn't possibly agree more. On one side you've got Fast Company's incredibly stupid project designed to essentially find the world's best social spammers, and on the other hand you've got W+K showing the world that there is value in understanding, and appealing to, the geeks of the world who are out there on YouTube, Digg, and Reddit actually making things "go viral".

Right before I left Freestyle Interactive I gave a short presentation on Internet memes, where they came from, why the communities that build them are important to understand, and how we might think about leveraging them as part of larger campaigns. I wish more people in the tech space took this seriously. 

You can't force something to go viral—but you can try. You don't do that by trying to find the person with the most followers on Twitter or the most fans on Facebook. You don't do that by putting "like" buttons everywhere. You do it by creating good content. And good social media content is that which is aware of where it lives, and how it travels across the tubes.

Old Spice and Wieden + Kennedy are well aware that they have a serious megahit on their hands with Isaiah Mustafa, aka "The Man Your Man Could Smell Like." He's done the two main TV spots, as well as the mustache clip, and now, in a truly fantastic addition to the campaign, he's doing a slew of personalized videos in which he thanks individual people—bloggers, YouTube commenters, Twitterers, celebrities—who've complimented his ads online.

I've been waiting for someone to do this for a while now. Pretty awesome how well W+K has done this. It's contextually relevant to all the right online communities and sub-cultures.

Perhaps my uncanny knowledge of memes and internet sub-cultures will one day be valuable. Probably not, but one can hope. :)

He added: "One possibility is that we're finally seeing the backlash from heavy media attention to Facebook privacy issues -- some of which were real, some the result of confusion and sensationalism."
It may also be that Facebook has less room to grow: It's got a 41.1 market penetration as of the end of June.

Ray Valdes, an analyst with market research firm Valdes, told the San Francisco Chronicle the company's big challenge isn't getting new members – it's keeping them.

"They don't necessarily need to grow user population to become a profitable, highly valued company," he said. "They do need to maintain their value proposition and keep users engaged even as the novelty factor wears off. It's not about getting users to sign on, but about getting them to log on."

Sounds good to me. The sooner Facebook dies, the happier I'll be. Facebook has done nothing positive for society. Facebook has destroyed the model of privacy we once had. It's made the world a dumber place. There are "like" buttons everywhere, as if anyone cared. I have them for every post on this blog, and I don't even know why. 80 million people spend time planting virtual plants. What the fuck did we do?

My disgust with Facebook is rooted in my disgust with myself. I signed up to Facebook when it was new. I was the one who told everyone I knew that it existed. I drank the Kool-Aid. I trusted Facebook. I know I'm directly responsible for getting at least 100 people to sign up for Facebook. They trusted me.

I look back on MySpace and say, "Wow, I can't believe people used to do this. This is terrible."
I look back on the Tamagotchi and say, "Wow, I can't believe people bought these. These are pointless." 
I look back on Facebook and say, "Wow, I can't believe I got my friends to use this. I'm an idiot." 

It is precisely at a moment like this—when Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission has made it legal for corporations to spend unlimited monies on political advertisements—that we must talk about our relationship to corporations, and to one another. We are obligated to examine what we are doing, whether we are updating our Facebook status or playing Call of Duty, because the results of those actions will ultimately be our burden, for better or for worse. We must learn above all to distinguish between the better and the worse. Citizens must educate themselves in the use of sociable applications, such as Wikipedia, Skype, and Facebook, and learn how they can better use them to forward their best interests. And we must learn to differentiate sociable applications from sociopathic applications: applications that use people’s sociability to control those people, and to satisfy their owners’ needs.

This is one of the best, most grounded, and most well thought out articles I've read on social media in a long time. It explains everything that we know is somehow wrong with applications like FarmVille but can't seem put into words. Mr. Liszkiewicz, I salute you.

There's no point in trying to summarize it. Just go read it. If you work in advertising, technology or media—read it twice.

This decision means that other user generated content services will not have to make the choice that YouTube had to make. Judge Stanton ruled that YouTube was operating within the framework of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) which says that web services that have infringing material in them must respond to take down notices but do not have to proactively weed out their services of all infringing material.

This is a huge victory for entrepreneurs and the web. I am ecstatic.

I kind of wanted Viacom to win this one. As much as I love YouTube, and as big a proponent I am of the safe harbor provisions set forth by the DMCA, YouTube took it too far. 

The reality is that YouTube didn't get to be #1 as quickly as it did by letting people upload videos of their cats. For a few years YouTube was the place to go for network television and other pirated content that they didn't have the rights to. They operated with impunity. I remember watching full episodes of The Daily Show, South Park, and The Colbert Report. It was this content, not lonleygirl15, that launched YouTube into the #1 spot. 

I'm not sure what Fred Wilson means by, "... a huge victory entrepreneurs and the web." How is this a victory? You can hide behind a safe harbor law to build an empire off of the hard work of others? At least half of the $1.6 billion they ended up selling for was value created through piracy. That's not a win in my book.

Posterous is running a campaign over the next few weeks basically calling out every other blogging platform. I've got to say, that's a damn ballsy move for a small startup. Then again, Posterous is fucking awesome, so perhaps it's spot on.

I use both Posterous and Tumblr. And while Posterous is, in my opinion, technically superior to Tumblr, the crew over at Tumblr has managed to create a community that can't be replicated with a few lines of code. They actually make an effort to be content creators. There aren't many other companies out there that make both a technology product and put hours behind shaping the content on the platform.

In order to make the checklist above accurate there should be a sixth bullet, "Incredibly active creative community," for which Posterous does not have a check mark. Still, props to Sachin Agarwal for having the huge balls to call out every other blog platform and let everyone know what they are missing. 

The maps are ordered by the number of pictures taken in the central cluster of each one. This is a little unfair to aggressively polycentric cities like Tokyo and Los Angeles, which probably get lower placement than they really deserve because there are gaps where no one took any pictures. The central cluster of each map is not necessarily in the center of each image, because the image bounds are chosen to include as many geotagged locations as possible near the central cluster. All the maps are to the same scale (a square measuring 15 miles on each side), chosen to be just large enough for the central New York cluster to fit. The photo locations come from the public Flickr and Picasa search APIs.

This is some really amazing work. You want to talk about effective media advertising? Start buying OOH media in all of the places that you know people take pictures. It's all right here, with street level accuracy.