Foursquare is loading up on their rules to prevent you Foursquare cheaters (you know who you are!) Great piece on Mashable about how they won’t prevent you from checking in anywhere, but the points associated are another story.
Details here: http://mashable.com/2010/04/07/foursquare-cheaters/
To follow up on my previous post about The End Of Advertising Agencies and The Beginning of the DIY Small Business Owner….
I couldn’t agree more:
The Last Advertising Agency On Earth from FITC on Vimeo
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A week ago Cadbury Chocolates Ireland announced the winner of their Cadbury Apprentice Contest to design a new Cadbury Milk Bar wrapper. All was well and the two top designers got well over 25,000 votes each. On Feb 15, 2010 they picked the winner, Sinead Costello. A lot of people voted for the design, but by the end of the day though, comments like this were appearing on the Facebook page: 
It appeared that the entry was pretty blatantly copied from a piece called Waterfall Transforming Into White Hooded Monks.
Here are the two pieces below:
Needless to say there are some striking similarities in the waterfall section. Similar direction and an almost identical pattern.
The real give away is where the ‘milk’ breaks mid stream in some rocks, and the placement of the hoods and ‘monks’ is pretty much unforgivable. See close up below:
Plagiarizing works is nothing new, but in an almost admission of guilt, Sinead has apparently deactivated her Facebook page, probably due to the sheer amount of criticism she may have been receiving.
The real loser here is Cadbury though. Crowd sourcing is a great way to engage consumers for local markets and build a reputation, but crowd sourcing also involves the public and their apparently devilish ways.
Cadbury may have seen some advantage in the fact that any publicity is good publicity (hence this post) but it seems that the disheartened other designers who hopefully have not done such work, may have lost their enthusiasm for such a campaign.
Cadbury did respond with this though:
In Cadbury’s defence, they do have a rule that entrants “must ensure that: (a) The entry is the entrant’s original creation and has not been copied, adapted or amended.”
Is it plagiarism? And how does Cadbury come out of this?
UPDATE: The term that should be used is spec work, not crowd sourcing considering there was no intention of collaboration between designers. Credit to David Airey for catching my mistake.
UPDATE: Cadbury had this to say:
Congratulations Paul!
Adam Ostrow (@Adam Ostrow) said it best on Twitter:
You know how politicians often break out the “tax ax“?
I think I’m going to coin the “buzzword bazooka“
If ‘pride goes before the fall’, then buzzwords go before pride.
If you work with search engines, you should probably know a few languages including HTML (I know it’s only markup!), PHP and Javascript. You don’t need to be fluent in PHP or Javascript, but you should at least know how to order dinner and find the toilet.
The fact is that search engine theory is just that, theory. Only a very few number of people know exactly how Google, MSNbot and Yahoo (soon to be Bing/MSNbot) crawlers work in a scientific sense. They’re not going to tell us anytime soon, just like Coca-Cola isn’t going to be tweeting their famous recipe any time soon. You have a whole industry based on theory, and rarely is it scientific enough to pass any muster. Buzzwords and phrases thrive in such areas. So let’s break down some fallacies.
Yes these are all parts of the search engine system, but take a step back and realise that it is a dance. You can’t dance with one leg, and you can’t get to the top of the page rank with just links. Spending too much time on SEO and not on being better for your customer is only the marginal gain you could have from actually just being better than your competitor.
So, what other buzzwords and theories need a bazooka reality check?
E-retailers, still somewhat in their pre-teen years as an industry are behind on a small, but vocal market. The visually impaired. It seems that while commerce and the internet continue to mold into one another, retail is failing to keep up.
The famous case is National Federation for the Blind’s lawsuit against Target for failing to make their site accessible, mostly via images and the content that goes into the code to allow non-visual users (including search engine crawlers) to understand what the image might be.
More here: http://ow.ly/19qts
This article is great for showing the looming beast on the horizon. It touches more on Facebook than anything but so it should, it is the largest network and probably the most thorough. 
For those of you out there that are considering such plans in social media, networking or whichever term you use, the statistics are quite staggering.
Check it out here:
My friends call me a dork for saying “These guys are the next travel agents” to any industry that drops the ball. The fact is travel agencies had it coming. They were expensive, unreliable and worst of all, did something you could do yourself if you were given access to the information. They didn’t own the vacation property, nor the airline and nor do they go with you. Half the time they screwed up or had such poor service you would rather do it yourself.
So what was their point? They were just gate keepers, and sites like Orbitz, Travelocity and Expedia along with direct to consumer campaigns by hotels and airlines opened the gate to the masses. I know what you’re thinking though: Orbitz and such are the travel agents now. Yes, they are if you consider bundling hotels and flights together, but now Kayak just takes your straight to the airline site if it is cheaper. In either case, we are more informed and pay less for the access to information. If you ask me, travel agents were the epitome of segregated information elitism. They could have done things to prevent themselves from being here now, but their inability to adapt to new media killed them.
And now advertising agencies are doing the same thing. Ad Agencies don’t own the product or brand, they don’t own the connection to the media and they don’t have any tools us regular folk have either.
Social Media is the thorn in ad agencies sides. They call it snake oil for two reasons:
So run your own social media campaigns. Set up multiple Twitter accounts, get your fan pages and groups up and running on your own. Encourage your employees to use those sites, with some scrutiny, to build more content than the next guy. Sooner or later, you’ll start to see the swell of a community that is a perfect marketing opportunity and by then you’ll know more about them than any agency could figure out.
The best thing about social media, is the instruction manual is in the medium itself. You know your products, customers and their quirks, why trust it to some agency that doesn’t know what you know?
Other agency services are up for grabs too.
Need a logo or graphics you can’t do yourself? Why get 3 to choose from in a agency and pay thousands when you can pay some $200 and get 221 to choose from at contest based hatchwise.com. The logo at the top of this page was produced there and I’ve used it for 3 other company logos. It’s great, cheap and gives me WAY more options. I can collaborate with the designers, message them directly and get really specific on what I would like and designers are more than happy to help out if that means they win the prize.
Need an ad produced? Crowd source. The best performing ads at the Super Bowl this year were ideas from customers, or produced by customers and in some cases written, produced and starred customers. With iMovie, Adobe Premiere and other easy software to use, a little bit of research and some time you can pretty much do anything an agency can, for less, without the attitude.
Why do you think agencies in special niche agencies pop up like new media and interactive marketing? It’s because most other agencies drop the ball in these areas. If you really don’t think you have the skill, then hire a specialized agency in that field.
Finally, we are seeing a tilt towards the small business owner. And that’s the way it should be.
Why? Because those big agencies have not adapted their vision, or their staff, attitude or their mission. And they better if they don’t want to become the next travel agency.
Layar is a mobile app that I have been playing with for Android Mobile Phones. Basically it uses your camera, GPS location, compass and accelerometer to calculate which way you are facing, and from where, to tell you web information on places near you and in what direction. 
Wikipedia is the obvious ‘layar’ to play with. It was easy and really fun to drive with it (passenger seat of course) and point my camera in a certain direction and get city data, local legends and other strange things that Wikipedia has. Layar also has local search and layers for bars, clubs and restaurants.
This makes it very important to be easily searchable, locatable and listable online for any business. I walked through London’s north west side with Layar and got tons of recommendations based on searches. But of course, non-tech savvy business owners were nearly impossible to find even on their door step. This isn’t Layar’s fault, it’s the business’s.
You can see more at http://www.layar.com or of course download it from Android Market and the Apple App Store.
Mashable, the social media hub for marketers and techies 
has a great article on how Google Wave can be helpful to businesses and project managers:
Google just keeps pumping out products faster than most of of can follow. 
Google Buzz is the nwe feature within Gmail (Google’s Email Client) that is similar to Twitter and Facebook in the sense that real time updates from your contacts are available within one click from your inbox.
I’m trying it out now, and you can see my profile here:
RT @TalkDigital: Nordstrom increases sales by merging inventory http://bit.ly/blxeVP