Word of Thumb: Product Placement Gone Viral, Or Am I Just Showing Off

"Most of the trouble in this world has been caused by folks who can't mind their own business, because they have no business of their own to mind, any more than a smallpox virus has." - William S. Burroughs, as quoted on thinkexist.com


This is a little outside of my normal posting style, but is connected, especially to the blogosphere posts from one of my other blogs (shameless cross-blog promotion), to something I wanted to write on, and was now inspired by FINALLY being able to accomplish something that I have wanted to accomplish since last October.  More on that in a sec.

A lot of things are written today about social media, but it seems a topic more people know about than do.  It's a buzzword, which is a shame.  People like to talk about it, but still for the average user it is halfheartedly-implemented, which means they stop right where their keyboard does.  That's okay to do for some, but it barely scratches the surface of what is out there and can be done when you add more than just reading and typing into the mix.

October, 2010, brought an interesting epiphany for me, because I was brought more into the SM (aside: social media needs a rename - if abbreviated that way the human mind will slip an errant "&" in there...) world than I had been previously.  I had the opportunity to be part of the FlipCam Team at IBM's Information on Demand (IOD) conference.  Disclaimer: I'm not an IBM employee, just a user and big fan of their Enterprise Content Management software. My task there was to carry around a FlipCam and use it to provide video snippets of "A Day in the Life of An ECM Attendee" that could be turned into video promos/summaries and placed on the conference's YouTube channel at the end of each day.

Here's the kicker: that's the extent of the requirements (other than to get signed releases if we filmed someone as an interview, or focus of the segment).  There was no script, at least at first.  It was just a collection of individuals, each with a separate focus at the conference, providing their perspectives.

So far this sounds like general marketing and promo stuff, but it's different, and more powerful.  There were no scripts from the folks running the program, but in beginning to think about how best to do what I needed to do, and in trying to thnk about how to make something engaging, since they were letting me run around with a new tech toy, I came up with plans for what and when I wanted to film.  I then followed these sort of short scripts, with asides and other things that I had to think about, and wanted to think about.

It was fun working, but doing something I liked, and it was related to my actual job.  It was exciting because it provided an outlet to creativity and an audience for that creativity.  It allowed me to interact with what I was doing and the things that were happening there at the conference, and to create new ways to tell the story about my particular corner of the world. 

At that point it was just footage, but the social part came in when I sent Tweets and blogged about it, with links to the videos the team was shooting, it allowed me to share with an ever-broadening group of folks.  When the links were seen by co-workers on campus, they forwarded them on to others via e-mail, and so on and so on.  The kicker: IBM gained promotion within an audience which included a personal introduction from someone the consumers would at least passingly care about.  In the same project, I gained a voice and creative outlet, and IBM gained representation in a marketing aspect for both the conference, and their software products.  Symbiosis...

So to the title of this post.  Social media gives us all both opportunities to gain voices, and opportunities to gain marketing exposure for the things we do, or are involved in.  In traditional media, if you see a real label, the manufacturer has paid to have it appear.  With social media, however, there is no placement, just glimpses into real things happening in real life.  I had so much fun doing the FlipCam stuff that I got interested in possibly doing more of the same type of thing using my cell phone's video capability.  I hunted around for free tools (I'll buy full versions as I do more of this, but until I find out which things work well...) to do the translations, and the editing, and to get the time, but in the end all of those things came together and I was able to put video I shot into this blog post.  Again, it's not an IBM commercial, it's kind of like my first FlipCam video without the FlipCam.  It's not product placement, but it winds up being a mention of something I do like (the smarter planet initiative), delivered by my favorite toddler when we talked. Here's the story, with a final point below the video:

I brought my older kids each a flashlight from the conference as a 'thanks for not tying your mother up and throwing a raging party while I was safely a couple thousand miles away' present, but for the toddler I bought a little T-shirt.  When I got home, she recognized the letters IBM and asked me what else it said.  I told her, "Let's build a smarter planet," and she repeated it back to me.  It was spontaneous, and cute, and though I had to ask her to say it again after I took a second to turn my camera on, it wasn't scripted.  The lighting was bad, the audio was bad and it wasn't a commercial, it was just a cute moment in which was also some portion of a message about something, now captured in a format that can be used within social media, as well as sent to grandparents and whatnot.

Final point: social media provides a new level of connection between the consumers and the producers.  Today a company that does not engage in an open social discourse is at a disadvantage.  There are a lot of old-guard 'command and control' types who want to be able to script, massage, filter and otherwise align social media into a one-way communication medium.  That can't be successful, because in an age where so much is digital, we have evolved relationships to have a cybernetic component, and most of us want a baseline level of honesty in our relationships. For instance, in one of my clips I mentioned it was exhausting to go to IOD because of the amount of information there is to digest.  'Command and control' says to change that to being energized because of the same factors; social media says it wants to know the straight story of how it was, PLUS know that when you catch up on sleep your brain lights up and applies all you learned. 

With a journey into the electronic we have lost some of the visceral, and by allowing something in that could in some way be taken as bad, the honesty quotient for the work was raised.  Honesty means that when something is wrong we talk about it, when times are good we talk about it, and we grow old and develop together.  And when we have something funny on YouTube, that sometimes promotes things that we are interested in.  I'm sorry to report that a lot of initiatives, and more of those in the education space than you'd expect, are being done in the wrong manner.