SWSX mag
I had a short piece in the SXSW quarterly mag that just came out. It was fun to try to carve the thing down from 400 words to 200. Here she is:

My favorite hour at SXSW '08 began with boredom. I was watching a panel on social media metrics gum its topic. I shuffled my feet, opened my laptop. Twittered. Stewed.

Ian Schafer leaned over. "Get on Meebo." I wasn't alone in my frustration!

-- guest439761: "20 minutes in and haven't really heard anything."
-- Christen: "don't tell me that there are metrics, tell me what they ARE, how to measure them, what the benchmarks are."

Michael Bassik went to the mic: "To give the panelists a heads up, Meebo chatters are demanding numbers and names." The moderator responded: "We've still got 30 minutes, we'll get to metrics." Ten more metricless minutes passed.

-- mvp: "someone hack the system and get this up on the screen."
-- mediastorm: "i say we all walk out."
-- nancy: "don't laugh! the panelist will think they are interesting."

We started plotting. Strip and storm the stage? A sweater flew, then a sock. We synchronized hand-raising. We coughed in unison. We riffed on metrical drink names and games.

Suddenly our hour was over. So soon? Awww. We'd net-worked a sixty-minute revolution, transforming private anger into collective action and a humorous new culture. And we were ready for Sarah Lacy.

Kudos to SXSW for publishing something critical of itself in the house publication. But I guess not that critical, because the hour was the most fun I've had in social media in a while.

Read this
Clay Shirky ties together gin, sitcoms and lolcats:

It's better to do something than to do nothing. Even lolcats, even cute pictures of kittens made even cuter with the addition of cute captions, hold out an invitation to participation. When you see a lolcat, one of the things it says to the viewer is, "If you have some fancy sans-serif fonts on your computer, you can play this game, too." And that's message--I can do that, too--is a big change.

I've been arguing for a while that blogging and web 2.0 grow out of a surplus of spare time/energy people have in the office -- and that smart companies can recycle the energy thrown off by that "spare" work. Shirky takes this to the logical extreme, saying society can do the same. Hat-tip to Gmarch on twitter.

Wonkette chapter 2
As you may have heard, Blogads is once again repping Wonkette.com. More here, here, and here. The latter link, on the LA Times blog, is particularly good on the nuances of what's going on.

To answer a question that came up a number of times yesterday: Blogads has zero ownership interest in Wonkette. We'll be the exclusive ad rep for the blog and our webmaster sister, Pressflex, which hosts sites like TheBanker.com and PerezHilton.com, will serve as its webmaster.

Blogads repped The Wonkette throughout 2004 and 2005 and had a mutually profitable relationship. As Blogads aficionados know, we're very reluctant right now to accept new blogs in the network; we're focused on serving our current blogging partners, the bloggers who've helped build Blogads, thrive. We've committed to represent Wonkette, a blog that's favorite of DC insiders and boasts a thriving community of commentors, because we believe the addition will add net dollars to the mix of bloggers we already represent.

Like Nick Denton, I think a brisk cold wind is blowing across all media. During the looming depression, times will be particularly tough for new social media companies. Many late arrivals to the field, still flush with cash and pheromone$ injected by VCs eager to hop aboard the Newest New Thing, don't yet feel the wind or see the snowflakes falling. (As in all gold rushes, a few glimmers of gold dust quickly swelled into golden boulders in the popular imagination, and the greedy and the needy flocked to the promise of gold laden with giant earth movers, leased Porsches and giant Excels stretching into hundred million dollar profitability in 2013.) Now, even as reality turns against the newbies, these folks happily starve or borrow for a while believing they, specially and uniquely, deserve to hit it big. But that willful fantasizing (they patience for now) won't last forever. We're beginning to hear rumors that several high valuation VC-funded companies -- blog networks, blog publishers, blog whatevers -- are almost out of cash, and will need to do down rounds (when early owners find their shares significantly diluted) to raise more cash and stay afloat. More on this in coming weeks. (As Mr. Drudge says "Developing!!!")

As the social media winter looms, the winners will be the folks with strong relationships, low overheads, a strong commitment on innovation rather than coat-tail riding, and, most of all, a indelible passion for the business. We're looking forward to seeing you after the bust. Meanwhile, we'll be mining bronze, silver and some gold with Mr. Denton, Mr. Layne and our many blogging friends.

Final(ish) Blogads intro video
Check out the latest (and last for a while) version of our "intro to Blogads" video. Thank you Nick Faber!

Al Gore's $300 million
We're thrilled that Al Gore's Alliance for Climate Protection is spending some of its $300 million ad campaign on blogs.

(BTW, we've lobbied hard for multiple links, better images, more information and sizzle. I wish the ad and its landing page were about more than harvesting e-mails. Oh, wait, that's all The Internets are good for.

TV is the place to deliver message right? Afterall, 100% of the candidates who've won elected office in the US in the last 30 years have relied on TV advertising, so TV must be essential and effective.

Minnie Skirt and the Bootlegs
From a show we saw in January.



More good stuff http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendID=292448099

Youtube = <$20 million?
Boggling at the claim that Youtube sold less than $20 million in video ads in '07.

SXSW echoes
Jeannine and Kevin took a bunch of great photos at the party that Blogads through with our friends at Deepfocus, Indiewire, IndieLense, NPR and PBS.

SXSW has posted the podcast from the Suxorz panel I organized and moderated.

Former Ad-tech chair Susan Bratton called it "the best panel" at SXSW in '08. Thank you Susan.

But I disagree vigorously with Susan's critique that the "lack of preparation is palpable" at SXSW and "poorly moderated sessions go on and on for more than an hour without a single, actionable insight delivered to the patient crowd."

I loved this year's gossip and black technology panels, both of which sparked spontaneous combustion between members of the audience and panelists. Actionable insights aren't what SXSW is about for me... it's connecting with people I love, a bunch of great experiences, glimpsing some new dimensions that don't necessarily arise out of a pre-baked moderator agenda but out of the mood of the room. I thought the Lacy/Zuckerberg interview was fantastic at a meta-level... watching Sarah fall on her face and witnessing the crowd's merciless twit-heckling was one of the most interesting social media experiences I've had in a long while. Ditto the Metrics panel.

What's ahead?
A reporter quizzed me about what's ahead for advertising in coming years. Here's a summary of what I told him:

a) Shilling. Social media, p2p publishing, crowd-sourcing, blogs, comments, video, Netflix ratings, social networking... nearly everyone online is creating content in one form or another. As "audiences with audiences" become the norm and conventional one-to-many media is dwarfed, companies will increasingly seek to buy or co-opt individual spokespeople to carry their message covertly or overtly. The temptation to do this covertly is huge, since non-disclosed proselytizing has a bigger impact. But obviously this is horrible civics, and shilling rots the public discourse. Companies nudging the industry down this slipperly slope include Payperpost (recently renamed to hide their business model) and BzzAgent.

b) Pay-to-play. With online content doubling every 18 months (Google estimate), we'll see the volume of information grow 100 fold in the next 10 years. If you think our infosphere is noisy now, you ain't seen nothing yet. To penetrate the chaos, more companies will pay carefully targetted consumers to get their attention. Here's $500 to test drive this car. Here's 20 cents to listen to this song. It's the model folks use to market time-shares, but with lots more algorythms and subtlety built in.

c) Advertainment. We'll see more advertiser-authored fictions that seek to entertain even as they deliver a kernel of a commercial message. This means ARGs like AudiA3 and Beta7, or videos like Tea Partay and Subservient Chicken, or more serious stuff like BMW films.

d) Networked advertising. Advertising will become network-based as opposed to channel or individual based. Background: advertising was previously conceived and delivered either per channel (for example via a particular publication or TV show) or per individual (ie through direct mail or micro-targetted online ads.) The emergence of millions of vibrant and interlocking social networks -- everything from Facebook to DailyKos to PerezHilton to Twitter to Boingboing to WorldofWarcraft -- means that marketers can aspire to connect with people as social beings. Why is this revolutionary? Many purchases are made socially: you decide what car to buy based on what friends are saying; you pick your t-shirt based on what certain friends are wearing. I'm not sure how that translates for your article, but it's the Big Picture. The ad for Secret Lives of Women, now running on PerezHilton, is a stab in this direction -- an advertiser's attempt to connect with a particular very densely networked community of 22-30 year-old-women in exactly the community and style they already inhabit on a daily basis.

e) You build it, you buy it. We'll see more companies work with the reader/audience/consumer to build a brand or product. The premiere example of this is threadless.com; the threadless community creates t-shirt designs, votes on t-shirt designs and then buys those same t-shirts. Blogads.com's logo was created by our users and voted on by our users in 2005. Though at the time I hated the design, today its a huge hit and people beg for our t-shirts. Think Move-on's Obamain30seconds. Or in a stretch, think Amazon Kindle, in which Amazon has consolidated all the market intel it has gathered peddling other people's products to build its own sellout gadget. People are more excited about buying things they've built AND stuff they've built usually fits their needs far more powerfully. The marketing and the manufacturing become a continuum.

An old friend
One of Blogads' biggest supporters just forwarded a link to an article I wrote in 1993 about an entrepreneur named Paul Panitz. It brings back lots of great memories. Here's the lede:

Asked about his black Converse All Stars, Paul Panitz, a 46-year-old millionaire, volunteers that they cost $19 five years ago. Later, he recalls buying an office chair for $50 at a 1981 auction. And on a given afternoon, he may be found in a copy shop not far from the Danube River, reminding employees that a copy machine uses six times less toner when operated with its lid closed.

I'll write more later about Paul.

Blog bubble
Michael Arrington surveys the VC and angel craze for investing in blogs and blog networks:

In short, I believe the money is being, for the most part, wasted. If a VC hands you a check, their intention is not to hang around for 20 years while you build a nice lifestyle business for yourself. What they want to see is an exit, preferably a 10x or higher exit, within 3-4 years. But something tells me that few of these networks are going to be able to grow quite as easily as they think and reach those liquidity events.

Amen brother.

$2 trillion bailout?
Try this thought experiment and see if your head (or wallet) explodes:

Hedge funds use borrowed money to finance their nearly $2 trillion in assets. With no way to value those securities and with banks refusing to lend against anything but gold and treasuries, many of those hedge funds will soon be forced to liquidate. The Fed can't let that happen, so it volunteers to take all those securities as collatoral.

The taxpayer ends up owning $100 million worth of ugly securities that it has effectively "bought" for $2 trillion.

And we thought the Savings and Loan crisis of the late 80s, in which taxpayers ate a $90 billion loss, was ugly.

No wonder gold is at $1000 an ounce. It's looking like the only way out of this mess is 15% annual inflation for 5 years.

Brilliant ad

Whew, now we're getting chemo!
In a big red box right now on CNNFN.com: "Dow soars 417, biggest point rise in nearly 6 years, as investors cheer Fed's move to pump $200B into the banking system."

It's amazing to me that this Fed move comes as a relief to anyone. This reminds me of some kind of sad joke that would go like this:

Patient goes in to the doctor's office thinking he's got a nasty cold. Doctor diagnoses cancer, prescribes chemotherapy. Patient goes home and tells his wife, "Good news honey! My doctor's given me really strong medicine for my cold."

Maybe all this buying is short-covering? Or maybe the down market has had far more rotten rumors built into it than we'd all guessed?

Or maybe the market will go down 10% in the coming month.

Henry Copeland bio
In February 2002 Henry Copeland started brainstorming a service to connect bloggers and advertisers. Here’s the original Blogads manifesto. The Blogads domain was registered March 5, 2002, and after six months of prototyping and programming, the service launched August 13. Things were quieter than expected. The first ad, for $32, trickled in on September 2.

Folks in the know "thought Henry was crazy."

Today Blogads.com connects 1300 blogs with a joyful stew of advertisers ranging from corporate giants to mom&mom T-shirt peddlers. Advertisers include NBC, Audi, PBS, Time Warner, JohnKerry.com, The Republican National Committee, The New Republic, Rhino Records, O’Reilly Media, Bagnews, Paramount Pictures, Random House, Network Solutions, Turner Broadcasting, eChristianWebhosting, Nokia, VH1, and Budget Renta Car.

During the '04 election, Blogads ran hundreds of ads for different candidates and causes, more different political ads than any other single online media. Henry "makes blogs possible," said leading bloggers.

Henry, 44, grew up in Wooster, Ohio and in 1984 received a BA in history from Yale University after nearly failing classes in economics, math and computer science. After working on Wall Street (’84-91) and in Budapest as a journalist (’91-‘98), in 1998 Henry founded Pressflex.com, the parent company to Blogads. Pressflex today serves as the webmaster for nearly 100 newspapers and magazines across Europe.

Henry has punditized about blog advertising at events including Blogtalk 1.0 in Vienna, Austria, iBreakfast in New York, NY, Blogon in Berkeley, CA, Gnomedex in Lake Tahoe, Nevada, Politics Online in Washington, DC, SXSW in Austin, TX, Ad-Tech in San Francisco, Chicago and NYC, Blognashville, Syndicate in NYC and San Francicso, iHollywood in LA, the AAN's annual conference in Little Rock, Promax in New York and Search Engine Strategies in Chicago.

Here's audio from two SXSW panels Henry moderated in 2006, Cluetrain: seven years later and Revenge of the Blogs: politics and election '08. And here's the podcast of Suxorz panel, which former Ad-tech chair Susan Bratton called "the best panel at SXSW '08." "the best panel at SXSW '08."

Henry is on the advisory board of George Washington University's Institute for Politics, Democracy & the Internet.

Department of dubious distinctions: Henry's blog is the sixth oldest by an American CEO, according to this list. And Henry is one of Gawker's New Dorks of All Media.

Henry's favorite bloggers include welch, langfield, layne, jarvis, bruner, teebee, arellanes, greg.

Favorite business books: The Innovator’s Solution, The Loyalty Effect, Emergence, Sam Walton: Made in America, Fooled by Randomness, Only the Paranoid Survive, Crossing the Chasm, The perfect store: eBay and Linked.

Sarah Lacy stuck in her bubble

Blogads intro video
With lots of weird options and allies, we've had trouble explaining our functionality in under 4 minutes. I'd welcome your thoughts on how to improve this video. Once we've got it polished, we'll feature more prominently on the site.

Metrics?
I guess we should have taken the question mark in the title more seriously when considering the panel
"Social Marketing Strategies Metrics, Where Are They?" yesterday. Because we all left saying "indeed, where are they?"

It seems that lots of attendees expected to hear about metrics. After all "metrics" was in the title and one of the questions to be addressed was "what is the best metric to focus on to gauge success of a social media effort?"

But about 20 minutes in, it started to sink in that this panel wasn't going to discuss any actual numbers, products, services or case studies. It was gonna be... talk. Theory. Impressions. Rohit did try to drag the conversation towards concrete information, but he was buried in other panelists' mush.

The ennui first started to percolate in twitter and then leapt over into Meebo the chat room dedicated to discussing the panel. Here's the full transcript. Many of the comments are real-time parodies or rebuttals to points being made so the full force of the
humor and vitriol may not be apparent.

At one point, up to 30 people were crowded into Meebo venting. It felt like Hungary circa 1988... you knew the wall was coming down, but the public space was monopolized and you had to resort to covert technologies and techniques -- coughing, hand-raising -- to express your dissent and solidarity with other dissenters.

As one Meebo put it, "How ironic is it that this panel of experts is being heckled in a chat room, but they don't know because they're luddites."

In the end, the total experience -- clueless panel and agitating audience -- was a phenomenal experience.

I'm a passionate fan of SXSW and hope that this Meebo log, perhaps paired with a transcription of the panel's podcast, can be used to motivate moderators and panelists to watch and listen closely to the audience (with Meebo open!) and not brush off the first impatient questioner -- 30 minute in -- who says "a bunch of people are talking on twitter and we'd like some specific data and metrics" with the answer, "we'll get to that later."

Because its always later than you think when it comes to social media metrics.

Perfect Porridge pegs me as "avenger."

Update: more on twitter as a mechanism for angry audience venting.

Avenger and friends intrigue Wired.

Suxorz panel
We had fun with the Suxorz panel this morning. We were seeking to define the worst social media marketing and advertising campaigns in living memory. I hope to post some summary thoughts later, but for now want to get links and results up, since folks have been asking for them.

After three elimination rounds, the crowd voted for The Worst. HP took the ultimate Suxorz prize with Cisco coming in as the runner-up.

Here are a few links... with a few more to come later.

Jeff Jarvis nominated Hewlett Packard for paying people like this woman to talk up their cameras.



And Cisco's attempt to spam the blogosphere and wikipedia with it's meme "the human network" by paying bloggers to write about the phrase.



And Giuliani's campaign for keeping a "private" Myspace page for most of the campaign.

Rebecca Leib argued that these beer ads were fantastic... but who the heck remembers Carlton?


And there was the famed Agency.com self-promotion in pitching Subway.




Charlotte Seles was incensed by Whole Food CEO Jim Mackey's covert trashing of his competition for 7 years on Yahoo message boards. She attacked Molson's campaign that gave "winning" college kids $8k for photos of themselves drinking. And she hated Sony PSP's "all I want for Christmas is a PSP."


Then there was SPS's fake "I want a playstation blog."



Steve Hall bashed Diet Coke for not totally jumping aboard the Mentos/Diet Coke fountain videos.



He bashed Target Rounders, the group Target created in Facebook to promote itself. Target told its Facefriends "“Your mission: try not to let on in the Facebook group that you are a Rounder. We love your enthusiasm for the Rounders, and I know it can be hard not to want to sing it from the mountaintops (and the shower, and on the bus…). However, we want to get other members of the Facebook group excited about Target, too! And we don’t want the Rounders program to steal the show from the real star here: Target and Target’s rockin’ Facebook group! So keep it like a secret!” http://www.kayesweetser.com/archives/58

I was thrilled to hear later that a Target staffer was in our audience, and was heard to be mumbling angrily throughout: "that wasn't us, it was the agency."

And he went after Walmart's "Walmarting across America," the bogus blog.

http://consumerist.com/consumer/blogs/walmarting-across-america-banned-pix-revealed-206843.php

From the audience Jackie Huba kicked in with the story of Marie Digby, fake grungy musician without a label. (Turns out she'd been signed for 18 months.)



Ian Schafer of Deep-focus summed up the panel here. http://www.ianschafer.com/2008/03/08/from-sxsw-the-suxorz-the-worst-of-the-worst-social-marketing/

OMG! "Firms that actually pay bloggers (a bit)"
Actually?

Fortune magazine suddenly realizes that some bloggers can actually make money. It profiles a three year old firm that has sent some bloggers as much as... wait for it... $30. How does this merit a story, when there are bloggers making 10s of thousands of dollars a month in advertising?

Booker T. Jones and Maceo
Last night we went to see Booker T. Jones Now 63, he was the prodigy who started as a session musician at Stax records when he was 16 and has played with Otis Redding, Clapton, NYoung, WNelson, Dylan... the list could fill a blog. Before the show he gave a talk and tossed off this anecdote about composing "Born under a bad sign" for Albert King.

Producers at Stax had to write for their bands. We were sitting in my living room. It was 11 o'clock at night. My wife was mad at me. But you know there has to be something wrong for things to go right.

He also talked about his percussive left hand on the piano or organ, hitting the fifth hard.

"My 5 year old daughter was sitting at breakfast and the radio was on. She said "Mommy, that's Daddy playing the piano." My wife said, "no, that's not your Daddy." My daughter said, "I know how Daddy plays." It turns out it was me."

We got his autograph, heard Green Onions, Bad sign. Then Maceo Parker. A few weeks back we heard The Dixie Hummingbirds and King Solomon Burke. We're loving Duke Performances.

More credit crunch...
The equation is simple: banks stop lending, so yield curve arbitrageurs melt. The latest puddle is Peleton, which has to sell $9 billion in high quality mortgage backs.
The FT reports:

In a letter to investors Thursday, Mr Beller and co-founder Geoff Grant said the ABS fund “has recently experienced difficulties in the challenging credit markets” and seen “severe” falls in value.

“In addition, because of their own well-publicised issues, credit providers have been severely tightening terms without regard to the creditworthiness or track record of individual firms, which has compounded our difficulties and made it impossible to meet margin calls,” they wrote.

According to people close to Peloton, the fund was 4-5 times leveraged, normal for a credit fund, with 14 banks owed money, including Goldman Sachs, UBS and Merrill Lynch. The banks are allowing Peloton to lead the sale.

Peleton, like Jerome Kerivel, is another synecdoche for the compound fantasy we've woven together... and are now unravelling.

Stupid comScore and stupidder journalists
ComScore released an estimate yesterday suggesting that the number of clicks on Google ads has fallen. Even as Google's traffic is growing 40%, comScore asserted that clicks were down 7% in January versus December and flat year on year.

The press uniformly covered the story as though comScore's numbers are fact and not an estimate. "Google hit by economic slump." "Google growth isn't clicking."

Even the SJ Mercury News, which should know its way around a story like this or at least be able to pick up a phone and call some people who know something offered this lame and incomplete gloss: " Google's paid "clicks" on search ads fell 7 percent between December and January and have not grown from the previous year, according to comScore, which measures Internet audiences."

Missing words: "estimated" or "projected."

Kinda like reporting a pre-election poll as the outcome of the election. And journalists would never do that, right? (Hmm.)

Google's value fell 7% at one point early in the day.

Compounding the silliness: a little checking would show that comScore's numbers are notoriously flawed, manufactured from a series of estimates of estimates, interpolations from tiny samples. A stroll over to the desk of the resident newspaper web teams would yield a stream of colorful comments about how clueless comScore is when it comes to guestimating web audiences and activity.

My money says comScore and the hundreds of journalists who reported its projections as reality will end up looking like idiots on this one.

Update: other folks familiar with search and comScore seem to agree. See David Rodnitzky for example. By day's end, even comScore was backpeddling vigorously.

Meanwhile, Brian Morrissey at Adweek reports: "SearchIgnite, a search management technology company employed by agencies and marketers, reports that in the first month-and-a-half of this year, paid clicks on Google are up 45.7 percent compared to the year-ago period. Advertiser spending climbed 40 percent. What's more, ad impressions rose 60 percent."

More comScore crow-munching. .

I think the dudes at Google are gonna have a major laugh when they publish Q1 results.

Conspiracy of dunces
Conspiring in broad daylight, the banks, insurance companies and regulators are scrambling to use bank money ($3 billion) to backstop the companies that insure the bonds ($2 trillion) that the banks own so the bonds be downgraded and drop in value. The WSJ reports:

"It became clear to all the different stakeholders...that if you had the right people talking, there was an intersection of interests that could be discovered," a senior Treasury Department official said. "Our goal was to have people focus on the potential of that intersection."

Take a look at the numbers, and you'll see the whole thing is a shell game conducted in slow motion with drunken, arthritic hands. It wouldn't fool a fifth grader, but then most fifth graders don't have enough money in the bank and have a wish stake in seeing the shell game succeed.

Halloran on Russia
CNBC.

Churnalism
Claiming that little journalism is original these days, UK investigative journalist Nick Davies

commissioned Cardiff University’s journalism department to do a study on the state of the industry.

The study looked at all domestic news stories over a two-week period from five British newspapers, including the quality papers--the Times of London, the Daily Telegraph, the Independent, the Guardian--and one mid-market paper, the Daily Mail.

The researchers looked at 2,207 stories.

They also had the Guardian news desk send along all of the material--such as press releases and wire stories--that the journalists had access to during that period.

The survey found that 80 percent of the stories in these papers--some of the most prestigious in the country--were wholly or mainly or partly based on information from pr departments or wire stories. The researchers weren’t sure on the origins of another 8 percent of the stories.

Only 12 percent were clearly original.

Further, the researchers found that when stories hinged on a specific fact, there was clear evidence that fact was checked in only 12 percent of stories.

Words that matter

Tony and Kareem
The web is host to many miracles, small and large.

In chapter 153,479,934 of the web's weird, wired wonderfulness, my buddy Tony Pierce helps teach one Kareem Abdul-Jabbar how to blog.

Subhed of the week
"Gore and Pelosi See Role as Honest Brokers in Tight Contest."

The Onion?

No, front page, right column of the New York Times.

Ruffini vs Ron Paul
Patrick Ruffini, one of the tiny handful of GOP strategists who get online and social media, is gleefully pushing for Ron Paul's primary defeat.

Here’s what Ron Paul says about TX-14: “If I were to lose the primary for my congressional seat, all our opponents would react with glee.” Give what you can. Ron Paul is running scared — using his Presidential campaign’s donors’ money to subsidize a desperate last-minute attempt to save his Congressional seat.

Ron Paul is, of course, the GOP presidential candidate who did not write the anti-Semitic, racists, paranoid bile that appeared in his eponymous newsletters for several decades.