Last month, while sifting through all the buzz about MySpace’s planned presidential primary, I was struck by this info bit from TechCrunch:

MySpace has more registered members than Mexico has people. If it was a country it would be the 11th largestin the world.

I knew that MySpace was enormous—but bigger than Mexico?

Then, just last night, per its nod from Ze Frank, I checked out something even more striking: Webcomic Randall Munroe’s incredibly cool Map of Online Communities and Related Points of Interest.

I hear the Gulf of YouTube is lovely this time of year.

Thanks to its beefy advertising campaign (whose reach made it nearly impossible to avoid), I recently checked out MINI Cooper’s Hammer & Coop advertainment effort.

Featuring a series of extremely well-produced ($$$) Starsky & Hutch-meets-Knight Rider-style webisodes (supported by a bunch of fun features like its Action Name Generator), MINI’s Hammer & Coop site is jam-packed with kitchy 70s retro fun.

The webisodes are Will Farrel-movie-style stupid. They objectify women. They make MINI drivers look like morons. The positioning is risky. The images are somewhat racy.

But they made me—a member of MINI’s professional, 30-something, hipster Gen-X target audience—laugh out loud. More than once. I liked it so much that I even sent the link to some friends. And most importantly, they reinforced my perception that MINIs are FUN.

Which is exactly what MINI’s brand has always stood for.

Last month’s Fast Company featured a piece promoting the idea that “if you want people to like you, first decide who needs to hate you.”

“Most marketers feel that if they make a bold statement, they risk not just alienating customers—but also their boss, and their boss’s boss,” says Charles Rosen, founding partner of Amalgamated ad agency. “That fear takes the edge off of all communications.”

So in order to create a powerful brand identity—the kind with messaging that delivers more than a flaccid “hey”—a brand must be willing to define who ISN’T in its audience. This level of targeting enables a brand to take more risks so that it can actually stand out and reach the right audience.

My dad and his friends probably wouldn’t laugh at or even like Hammer & Coop.

But my dad also wouldn’t be remotely interested in buying a tiny non-luxury car. Which is EXACTLY why Hammer & Coop is so surprisingly smart.

Marketing buzzwords and catchphrases that make me cringe:

1. Outside the Box
2. Synergize/Synergy/Synergistic
3. Low-Hanging Fruit
4. The Big Idea
5. Cut Through the Clutter
6. Monetize
7. Organic Growth
8. Integrated Solutions
9. Commodify/Commoditize
10. Unique Value

The latest word to join the list? Web 2.0.

Companies are diving into 2.0-style efforts without really understanding how to make them work. And without a strategic marketing plan and resources dedicated to implementation, these dives are quickly turning into money-burning belly-flops.

Being a relevant part of the “conversation” that so defines Web 2.0 doesn’t just mean launching a blog and updating it when you have some spare time. You can’t just create some randomly messaged wacky video, pop it up on YouTube, and expect new business to come rolling in. Web 2.0 tools don’t come with some sort of “if you build it, they will come” guarantee.

As beautifully broken down in Rob Rose’s recent iMedia Connection piece:

…many of these new technologies can indeed take our online marketing efforts to the next level. And our customers are going to come to expect these capabilities from us in the near term.

But, just as important is our ability to deliver on the promise of Web 2.0. Don’t forget the overarching lessons of Web 1.0 circa 1997 to 2000: Don’t build technology just because you can…

So before your company takes the Web 2.0 plunge, make sure you know what you’re diving in to–and know how to swim once you’re in it. Take the time to develop the kind of comprehensive, integrated strategic marketing and implementation plan that’ll enable your effort to pull off a proverbial Triple Lindy.

1. 2004: Created a profile on Friendster
2. 2005: Created a profile on MySpace and Xenga
3. 2006: Created a profile on Facebook, Linked-In, Flickr
4. 2007: Created a profile on Vox, the Org

Like most Gen Xers, over the past few years I’ve built up quite a social networking track record. But after years of creating, maintaining, and reviewing so many profiles and so much content, and after participating in all those interest-driven discussion groups, I’m kind of over it.

Actually, I’m really over it. I hereby proclaim myself America’s first identified sufferer of Social Networking Fatigue Syndrome (SNFS).

Web 2.0 is supposed to be about integration and collaboration—not segmentation. Having to update and communicate through all of these different sites sucks the “cool” right out of them, which is one of the reasons why I’m so skeptical about the push to build segregated social networking components into corporate websites (see Jay’s and Jason’s past blog posts about Rolling Stone and USA Today’s efforts).

While the first batch is creating buzz capable of achieving the desired results (USA Today’s effort has been extremely successful), I have to believe that most users are going to get tired of having to create, update, and maintain separate profiles, relationships, and conversations on separate sites. I predict that SNFS is going to spread and users will drop off.

But there’s hope. The antidote could come in the form of some kind of Web 3.0-style “semantic” tool that could, in a user-customizable way, intelligently weave all of these networks back together. Imagine an RSS aggregator combined with a Yahoo! Wallet profile generator.

Until that SNFS antidote comes around, I’d advise companies to hold off on creating their own social network-driven websites, and instead focus on getting target-audience buy-in and boosting brand relevancy by crafting and developing their profiles on existing mainstream social networks. Looking forward to some of you proving me wrong….

Over the past few months, I’ve offered up tons of info nuggets and assessments on new media’s evolution and impact on marketing, communication, and society….

But this weekend (while searching YouTube for Lloyd Dobbler’s, a.k.a. John Cusack’s, “future plans” monologue from Cameron Crowe’s much-loved 1989 film, Say Anything), I stumbled upon something that really brought all of those referenced metrics, articles, and white papers to life—16-year-old aspiring musician Eric Striffler’s MySpace band profile, featuring the song “She Wrote About Me in Her Blog.”

Lyric highlights include:

She wrote about me in her blog,

and I read it,

and thought to myself she goes deeper than anticipated… 

She came online,
and I lost track of time,
we talked into the morning,
and not once did it get boring… 

Now we’re both out in the open,
we can’t hide behind the keyboards anymore…

The song tells the tale of how a someone used a blog to create specific content to reach a desired target audience in order to start a conversation and ultimately build a relationship.

I can’t imagine better evidence to prove the relevancy and impact of blogging than a song based on blog interaction. For the younger set (tomorrow’s older set, FYI) blogging is more than mainstream.

Then check out this snarky diagram by famed designer Paula Scher. It breaks down the all-too-typical flow of blog comments and content.

It’s a great depiction of how any idea can get turned inside out, and how the presentation of any perspective is sure to invite its counter-punching counterpoints.

(Props to Ze Frank for pointing this out.)

The nominees for the 2007 Webbys (like the Oscars but for websites) have been announced and posted online. Check ‘em out and let me know who you think should win and why….

More proof that simpler can be better.

Check out this author’s website.

Most of us have a refrigerator and a dry-erase marker. Sometimes less is more, though sometimes it really is less.

Do you love it or hate it?

Check out the latest evolution in the online video-watching revolution: Magnify.net.

As described by TechCrunch:

Magnify.net is a new video startup that is different from the rest of the crowd. Unlike YouTube and dozens of others, it isn’t focused on building a portal around user-uploaded videos. Instead, they are allowing website publishers to create their own video channels, and populate it with videos from other sites (like YouTube, Revver, Yahoo Videos, etc.) that allow embedding.

This whole “channel” trend is kind of a throwback to why people used to love AOL so much—the idea of populating “channels” with categorized content. It’ll be interesting to see if this still appeals to today’s Web users.

A few weeks ago, I came across this piece in The Washington Post:

. . .when the Yale law student interviewed with 16 firms for a job this summer, she was concerned that she had only four call-backs. She was stunned when she had zero offers.Though it is difficult to prove a direct link, the woman thinks she is a victim of a new form of reputation-maligning: online postings with offensive content and personal attacks that can be stored forever and are easily accessible through a Google search.

Which got me thinking: When was the last time I Googled myself?

While self-Googling, a.k.a. “egosurfing,” was once shunned (or at least not admitted publicly) because of its seemingly narcissistic intentions, it’s quickly become key in managing one’s professional reputation. As stated by George Lichter, President and CEO of SEO-famed InfoSearch Media:

“. . .a simple Google search can bring up all sorts of information, both positive and negative. . . .People need to be in control of their ‘personal brand.’ A prospective employer or school admissions committee isn’t going to respond well to a blog page littered with party photos. According to a recent study by ExecuNet, seventy-seven percent of executive recruiters run background checks on candidates by using search engines.”

So, have you Googled yourself lately?

Just a few months ago Time named “You” the Person of 2006, based on the boom of social and professional networking sites like MySpace, LinkedIn, and Friendster, as well as the growth of personal blogs and websites. But this boom also increased the number of opportunities for “You” to come up in search engine results—which means that the first impression you give potential clients, employers, or industry peers may very well be crafted by the links that come up after your name has been entered in a Google search.

(more…)