It looks like the major networks have bought in to the web video phenomenon, at least until the next ratings book comes out. Witness the new ABC show i-CAUGHT, which I did in fact catch the other night. The concept is to highlight what is most popular on the web. We’ll see how long it takes for the network to make money from these clip-sharing folks (or maybe they already are).

I’m interested to see if this marriage between Internet video and broadcast TV will last. It looks like it has potential. One of the more interesting viral segments asks people to submit videos for inclusion in the show. The concept is to put in three words how your week has gone. The first round got my attention.

I enjoyed this idea so much I had to submit my own. Here’s hoping I make the cut next week!

Early in my career, I worked for a company that provided broadcast faxing (yes, those annoying travel and restaurant deals that scrolled through your machine every morning). As communications technology evolved, email, instant messaging, and texting were about to relegate fax machines to the proverbial burn pit. We found ourselves looking over the edge of the obsolescence cliff—and we had no idea what to do.

Instead of adapting, our management team clung with a death grip to our outdated, antiquated business model. We refused to believe the fax would fade, and we became an old rusted-out family sedan sputtering along the business superhighway.

Fast-forward to 2007. Post dotcom boom, bust, and rebirth. Welcome to the world of Web 2.0, where I’m finding plenty of opportunity to apply the lessons learned from the fax past.

Most corporations have barely dipped a toe in the marketing pool that is Web 2.0, but enlightened entrepreneurs are diving in head first. David Gumpert of BusinessWeek reported that a recent panel discussion at the MIT Enterprise Forum of the Northwest reaffirmed that utilizing Web 2.0 technologies must be done with a combination of business savvy and just plain common sense.

For the average entrepreneur there is much less risk in the world of business and social networking sites than for a corporation. With the risk of looking like a 30-year-old at prom, a corporation must analyze a multitude of factors when looking to swim in the Web 2.0 marketing pool. One piece of critical advice from the MIT panelist—for corporation and entrepreneur alike—is to make sure you create a two-way dialogue with your consumer audience.

Consumers don’t want to hear preaching about a product or service without being able to share their voices in return. Gumpert added that globally there has been an increase in early-stage business use of the Web 2.0 marketing machine—but experts remain divided on its rewards.

That sounds like the adoptive evolution of any business innovation. The question is, do you want to side with cynical, change-resistant experts, or do you want to shape the use and impact of revolutionary marketing approach?

In other words, do you want to ride along in that rusty old sedan, or test-drive a high-performance prototype?

Want a clue that a pastime has truly caught on? Look no further than the 12-step program designed to help people kick their addiction to it.

I came across an article today on wikiHow explaining How to Break a World of Warcraft Addiction. I haven’t played and don’t know a lot about World of Warcraft, but I don’t doubt that MMORPG games like this can become an all-consuming pastime.

The contributors to this article have taken some pretty creative approaches to curbing addiction. A few of my favorites:

• Take up some sort of martial art that is similar to your character in WoW
• Burn yourself out by finding the ways to cheat
• Sabotage your WoW future (by erasing all the progress you’ve made through hours of time spent playing the game)

If these strategies don’t do the trick, we can take a lesson from the government of China, where they employ a novel strategy for curbing gaming addiction outlined on the offbeat news story site Howl @ The Moon: curfews and virtual penalties.

It works like this (in theory anyway): Kids under 18 (everyone has to register with an ID card) can only play an online game for a max of 3 hours per day without incurring any penalties. The longer they stay on beyond this limit, the more online penalties they incur (in their individual game worlds) and therefore the more they get penalized within the game. For example, a kid breaking the online curfew in World of Warcraft would start to lose experience points rapidly, thus negating the point of playing the game.

Help for sufferers of other online addictions is also available, uh…online:

Center for Internet Addiction Recovery
How to Defeat a MySpace Addiction
How to Control a wikiHow Addiction

We’re pretty sure everyone’s seen this, but in case you haven’t . . .

We sympathize. It’s tough to stay on message when you’re not sure what your message is.

Today’s rhetorical question: How do you get to be a highly paid, high-power CEO and not know how to use email?

Spirit Airlines CEO Ben Baldanza is mulling that one over as negative spin caused by his customer-dissing missive works its way around the Web. A pair of passengers were irked that a three-hour delay caused them to miss a concert in Atlanta.

They were hoping Spirit would pick up the tab for the tickets and hotel room, renumeration that would have set the company back a bit less than four hundred bucks—probably lower than greens fees for one of the boss’ golf outings.

The couple took their complaint one step further by emailing Spirit CEO Ben Baldanza directly. But here’s the thing…they also copied several other Spirit employees on the complaint.

That’s when the email-challenged CEO hit “reply to all” in his response.

And his reply?

“We owe him nothing as far as I’m concerned. Let him tell the world how bad we are. He’s never flown us before anyway and will be back when we save him a penny.”

Ben, here’s my new Spirit slogan suggestion:
Spirit—We Cost Less and Couldn’t Care Less

If you have Spirit slogan ideas, let’s hear them here.

While this sounds like a cheap rip-off of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, it is in fact a case study of the power of an idea when coupled with the new Internet. I am not going to recap, but let the clever perpetrator, Oli Young, explain the premise here. And if you are really cool, the Facebook group is here.

While his explanation is entertaining, Young notes some valuable lessons learned. He believes the underlying truth is that viral marketing is hit or miss, yet his later discussion highlights just how you hit. Here is what I make of it.

#1 Don’t try too hard – People don’t react well to any presentation that is too smooth, too aggressive, or too good to be true.

#2 Do consider content – Here, try hard. As Young notes, content is still king. Complex concepts and elaborate themes based on good ideas will garner attention regardless. Again, this goes against aggressive marketing in lieu of better production.

#3 Don’t expect immediate results – Just like its biological counterparts, viral marketing progresses geometrically. That means the size reached tends to double regularly. On the bottom end, 10 to 40 viewers in 3 weeks may not seem like much, but if it is steady, that equals 20,480 in 3 months. (However, let’s not forget to be realistic about 41,943,040 in 6 months, however…just showing the general principle here.)

#4 Do expect a community to form – People rally around ideas…even bad ones, but especially good ones. They become engaged in them. This should always be kept in mind with dealing with participants.

#5 Don’t rely on traditional media to explain it – So far the Fourth Estate doesn’t quite understand the fluidity and malleability of the new Internet. They still accept too much at face value. Young only had a few journalists talk to him, let alone ask him if it was a scam. Instead, most of them just accepted it at face value. Most users did not. So it really makes a good argument for individual judgment.

Overall, it is a very insightful, successful, and juvenile experiment in the wonders of Web 2.0. The only negative I see is that there isn’t some lucky lad out there named SpiderPig Sparkhall Young.

In a recent survey by ChangeWave, the iPhone is receiving a customer satisfaction rating of 92 percent. (By comparison, Blackberries receive the second-highest rating, at 50 percent.) At the risk of sounding like another Apple cheerleader, I have to admit that I’m one of these customers.

But I hadn’t expected to be.

I haven’t had good experiences with PDAs and smartphones. The Treo 650, for instance, was a nightmare when it came to bulk, reception, and sound quality. And gradually the idea of hunkering down over a tiny glowing screen with a stylus seemed less and less cool. A friend reminded me, “You work in an office—you should want to spend less time at the computer, not more.” So I bought the simplest clamshell I could, resisted the temptations of the Crackberry, and felt liberated from my gadget obsession.

Then the iPhone ad campaign began. I admitted to myself I was curious, but I reminded myself how much I hated smartphones and tiny screens. I had trouble believing that any touch screen could be genuinely comfortable. I’ll go see a floor model, I thought, and that will be that.

Of course, that’s like an alcoholic walking into a bar to look at a “floor model” of the latest brand of vodka. Once a gadget freak, always a gadget freak. I went to my local AT&T/Cingular store after work—after the lines had died down and the mobs had left it looking like the remnants of a party: dirty floors, disorder, and a significant number of stragglers snapping up the final stock. I asked myself if I wanted to be one of these people. One guy received his new iPhone over the counter with a classic air of paranoid covetousness—like Gollum possessive over his precious (and it should go without saying that there is significant overlap between tech early adopters and Lord of the Rings devotees). The staff had long since run out of the decorative gift bags.

“You bought into the hype, man, you got sucked in.” These are the things that reformed early adopters say to each other. My friend wouldn’t even look at my iPhone he was so disgusted. “I swear,” I said, “I went in to look at a floor model.” And that’s what I had done. And the next day I found an Apple store that hadn’t sold out, and walked out self-consciously transporting, through a crowded mall, the black decorative gift bag that is a mark of pride or shame, depending on your state of mind.

What sucked me in?

First, the iPhone is aesthetically pleasing. Second, it’s a pleasure to use. And that’s about it.

It’s not because I need to check email away from the computer. It’s not because Web surfing is absolutely essential wherever and whenever. It’s not because I get to listen to music while talking on the phone and chatting and emailing and surfing the Web and looking at photos and using Google maps and popping off a beer cap with the built-in bottle iOpener. And after all, the iPhone’s greatest innovation is that it does less than any other smartphone!

Really, it comes down to intriguing innovation in user interface that is hard to resist. The touch interface makes it enjoyable to surf the Web—the only small device I’ve used for which this is the case. And when I say “enjoyable,” I don’t mean merely “functional” or “tolerable,” and I’m not saying that what it does is more useful than other phones; it’s just fun—justifiably unnecessary.

The best way to describe why this is so is to say that the iPhone decreases the distance between you and the tasks you’re trying to perform. That’s an immediacy that technology usually takes away via mouse, keyboard, and stylus interfaces. Getting to use your fingers, on the other hand, is satisfyingly basic—even primal. Hence the iPhone may also be the anti-gadgeteer’s gadget in the same way that the Wii is the non-gamer’s video game. And both I see as an extension of recent trends in social networking, which have become successful by lowering the barrier of entry for users and applying principles of simplicity and immediacy that Google and Apple have adhered to for some time.

The only question left, of course: will it blend?

Round pegs. Square holes. You know the story. Someone over at The New Yorker decided it would be uber-cute to add life to their cartoons, rendering these one-panel one-liners as quick animated clips. Yeah, I hear crickets chirping too.

I love animation and video, multimedia in all its multivariate forms, but this is overkill. New Yorker cartoons work because they are so easy to digest—a quick, witty fistful of mental popcorn, and the printed page or static computer screen is more than adequate. Gumming up instantaneous entertainment makes them almost tedious. And if your Flash player isn’t up to snuff, or the feed is getting crushed, the payoff is a mile away.

I do understand their animation temptation. The executable simplicity of enlivening and streaming these magazine mainstays must have made this idea an easy sell. But here, the media gets in the way of the message.

This is literally a case where the idea only works on paper.

I just discovered and became an instant fan of “Chuck Klosterman’s America,” a series running in Esquire magazine by, well, Chuck Klosterman. Klosterman’s style is provocative and hilarious, like Andy Warhol meets Jack Handy. His anecdotes are filled with irony and introspection, and even when the subject matter is outside of my experience, his inner monologue feels disturbingly like my own.

In his most recent installment entitled “The Ethics Paradox,” Klosterman describes a bewildering scene in a movie theater. At a screening of Ralph Nader’s documentary, An Unreasonable Man, Klosterman and a theater full of presumably socially conscious citizens sat by and uncomfortably ignored an elderly man in the back of the theater as he coughed, vomited, and maybe even had a seizure.

We were actively watching a movie about ethics, yet consciously ignoring every ethical impulse any normal person should have.

The scene illustrated the disconnect that we as Americans, or maybe just as people, can have between thinking about, promoting, or believing in the right thing and actually taking socially responsible action. In Klosterman’s example, one can see the disconnect “between the experience of watching An Unreasonable Man and the experience of being alive.”

I found the article particularly relevant to our blog’s discussion of new media. Even more so because of the title of this blog and the values we hold as a company. We intend to better understand how new media affects our industry, but we also mean to inspire action and have a positive effect on the world around us.

Klosterman’s article provokes some very interesting questions. Can the Internet make you a better person? Does the increase in social activism on the Web correlate to an increase in socially conscious action in the real world, or does a similar disconnect to the one Klosterman describes exist for even the most active of online social activists?

So, tell us. Are there social media sites out there that are producing the kind of real-world activism that they aim for? Has anything on the Web inspired you to act? Let us know.

What a luxury to be able to respond directly to a news story about you or your organization. Google recently announced a system allowing such responses on their Google News blog:

We’ll be trying out a mechanism for publishing comments from a special subset of readers: those people or organizations who were actual participants in the story in question.

MediaPost discusses the potential conflict here between Google and mainstream news outlets. What exactly is Google doing? Are they now a news outlet? Will they employ journalists who will actually pursue the reactionary soundbite and edit it for publication?

I realize Google is becoming the everything to damn near everyone, but this move seems to me to be a huge jump away from what is, according to Google’s Company Overview webpage, their mission:

Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.

Where does it say “creating information”? Google is search. Google is online applications. Google is search-based advertising. Google is, well, according to this Google page, Google is lots o’ stuff, and it’s adding more stuff every day.
I remember a time when another company that made its bones in search decided to expand into a cloud of features and services, diluting the brand it had solidified. It became the everything to damn near everyone. And then Google showed up and kicked Yahoo!’s ass. Does anyone else feel like they’re listening to Justin Timberlake? “What goes around, comes back around…”

Megabrands can, for a time, get away with breaking some of the 22 immutable laws of branding, simply because the train is rolling so hard and fast. But I’m a firm believer that you can’t get away with diluting the brand to something indefinable. If you get into the information creation business, Google, it may well end up hurting your brand.