This Friday, some fellow LevelTen employees and myself will make the trek down to our capital of Austin, Texas for the South by Southwest Interactive Festival. This 5 day event includes many educational panels and keynote speakers from industry innovators and leaders. In addition, there are nightly parties for those who are looking forward to experiencing Austin’s famous downtown nightlife.

I will be blogging about my experiences on the LevelTen Design blog and will hopefully learn some new things while I am there. The highlight of the trip for me will be to hear Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook.com’s Founder and CEO, give his keynote talk on Sunday. Check out the entire panel schedule on the SXSW website to see all the daily events.

And for those who are attending, check out this online scheduler to help you keep track of the events on each day.  It has some great features and gives descriptions of each panel or event. I thought it was also easier than looking up all the panel descriptions on the SXSW website.

A recent turn of events involving a blogger and Facebook, have brought about a very important question regarding the ownership of information that is available on social networking sites.

As reported by MediaPost, Wednesday night blogger Robert Scoble was kicked off of his own Facebook account for using a new feature of Plaxo to gather the names, e-mail addresses, and birthdays of his 5,000 Facebook friends. The ever popular social network claims that running this type of script to collect a large amount of data goes against the site’s Terms of Use. A recently created Facebook group that is campaigning to get Scoble’s account reinstated has more information on the matter.

While I understand that preventing scripts like this from running on Facebook is a necessary way to keep out spammers, I am left wondering why Facebook feels they have the right to stop you from collecting your friends’ information. If an individual creates a Facebook, MySpace or LinkedIn profile complete with their name, e-mail, sometimes address and phone, they are making the conscious decision to put that information in a public domain. I know you are probably saying to yourself that you have “privacy” settings, but your information is still in a public area (the world wide web=very public). But the real question that is likely to be debated heavily this year is when you put your information on a profile, does it become the property of the website/social network?

In my opinion, the answer is no. That’s the whole idea of the Web 2.0 era: websites with content generated by the users. It is the user’s content, not the network’s. Social networks would be blank pages without the information provided by the users. Facebook certainly shouldn’t think they have the right to own that information and do with it what they want. I know they do share some of the resonsibility to safeguard their member’s information, because otherwise people would be aprehensive about joining and creating that content. However, the information is not theirs, the do not own it and they cannot simply use it for their own advertising purposes (as it was recently thought they might).

So, what’s the moral of the story? Social networks need to respect the users who generate their content and realize it’s not their property, while users need to safeguard themselves and not put information on the web they don’t want the world to see.

**Article originally published on LevelTen Design Blog.

While I am pleased that it is a topic that gets people talking, I believe many people missed the main focus of my original article. From a marketing perspective, the ads run by Sunsilk that featured blonde haired women facing off against their brunette counterparts, really hit people on a personal level and made their commercials stand out from the average hair product ads. It seems as though these ads helped spark this recent activity on the web, which is a good marketing result for the product.

As a response to the 74 comments, the Sunsilk ads, and my article, were meant to be funny and not meant to be taken as seriously as some of the comments reflect. The ads were not meant to be offensive, and the idea that someone would sue over what these ads say is simply absurd. Of course everyone is going to have their own preference of which hair color they like on a woman, man, whoever. Hair color has nothing to do with brains, beauty or personality. And as far as implying that the actions of famous celebrities are a result of their hair color, ridiculous. I would never want to be put in the same category as some of the celebrities that share my hair color.

I hope that many of you were simply joking with the comments on my article, and that some people got the main point of my article: The campaign was a successful marketing tactic.

Life should never be taken that literally.

Take a look at my fish below (click on the water to feed them) and then go get your own.

Not sure what to name them…

Here is mine:

Next Monday, October 15, 2007, I will be participating in Blog Action Day. It is a day for all bloggers to give their opinions about one topic, the environment. Currently, there are over 8,000 participating blogs. All you have to do is write one post, how easy is that? So if you blog, I highly suggest joining the effort. You don’t have to agree with someone else’s opinion, just share your own. Check out their website for more information or to sign up your blog.

It will be interesting to see the impact so many blogs can have from discussing one topic in a single day.

This video has a great explanation:

People are no longer using the main search engines to locate the information they seek. They are turning to social media, social bookmarking sites, RSS feed-readers, specific vertical search tools, and multimedia. Both large and small corporations have created profiles on MySpace, groups on Facebook and lenses on Squidoo. Of course, traditional SEO techniques are used in these socials media sites to insure that people can find the information you want them to find about your company.

Likewise, the whole element of reputation management goes along with a company’s involvement in social media. Search engines are turning into a reputation management system. You may not be able to control the negative articles written about your company, but the more positive articles your company can distribute through social media sites, the better off they will be. With this comes the fact that SEO firms must be able to manage what is said about their client, both positive and negative, in every media form possible.

As the search engines begin to reach out to social media, they have also introduced their own extension called Personalized Search. Personalized search can basically be summed up as an SEO’s worst nightmare, because individual search results are reordered based on the searcher’s previous search behavior, their home page content, bookmarks, search history, web history and so on. This will have a large impact on keyword analysis since one company could be the #3 result for one searcher and the #11 for another. SEO firms must be willing to adapt quickly as this change is happening now.

In his article, Hedger points out that placing calls to action leading to social or browser based bookmarking and building smarter link/tag networks, along with the traditional SEO tactics, will be the key to optimizing personalized search. So, for all of the companies out there who have not yet gotten involved in social bookmarking, start now.

With this growth of social media, companies will have to rely on the expertise of SEO firms that offer all of the above services as more and more people will turn to these social media sites for information and more engines will offer the dreaded personalized search. Because as we have learned today, the information seeker will always be interested in search, but won’t always be interested in the traditional search engines as their preferred means of search.

**Originally published on LevelTen Design Blog.

This website is a subtle and smart attempt by the California Milk Processor Board to go viral with its milk marketing. Most likely to combat the ever increasing soy milk market. While many times viral sites have the lifespan of a few days and simply lose their “funny” appeal, I believe this site has some staying power. This site has the potential to be passed around from email inbox to inbox with its hilarious mixture of videos, photos, and cleaver FAQ responses.

Here is one example of their carfeully crafted, marketing answers:

Mark from Chicago, IL
Q: Why would aliens choose to abduct cows? Why couldn’t it have been me?
A: Mark, can you produce a deliciously frothy drink that helps maintain strong bones, helps reduce the risk of cavities, helps promote healthy hair, helps rebuild muscles after a workout, may help reduct the symptoms of PMS and if consumed at night, may improve your sleep, not to mention makes one heckuva compliment to fresh baked chocolate chip cookies? If so, you are in great danger.

**Originally published on LevelTen Design Blog.

The movie has been accompanied by several unique and inventive types of promotions. The 7-Eleven Kwik-E-Mart promotion was introduced in early July, shortly followed by the JetBlue Flight Log promotion. While it appeared that both promotions were film funded, 7-Eleven announced that they footed all the costs. No doubt that they benefited from the extra sales of the pink donuts and Squishees, but this was truly a creative and monumental promotion. The JetBlue promotion also had a great viral aspect to it, with Mr. Burns taking over the CEO’s blog. It was surely emailed around offices nationwide. So what was the next planned promotional attack for this highly anticipated movie? Why, appeal to the fashion industry of course.

The entire Simpsons clan is featured in the upcoming issue of Harper’s Bazaar, modeling the latest couture fashions in Paris with supermodel Linda Evangelista. It was interesting to see Marge in something besides her green dress and even letting her hair down in one spread. The drawings do a fabulous job of imitating current fashion trends and fashion designers such as Karl Lagerfeld and Marc Jacobs.

After this unique promotion, released only shortly before the movie’s debut, I am left wondering, what else do they have planned? Maybe a Krusty the Klown take over of the television airways? Or did Sideshow Bob already do that on a Simpsons episode?

Several announcements from Apple, such as Tuesday’s announcement that Apple would be releasing a software development kit for the iPhone, have already disappointed industry insiders. This announcement, although expected, was especially disappointing because developers will only be able to write Web applications for the iPhone using the devices on Apple’s Safari browser. Industry leaders believe that by limiting the development to Safari, which currently holds a 5% market share, innovation will be stifled. Since Web applications are believed to be the future of software, it is especially disappointing that the iPhone won’t be opened to third-party software. Read the full article on Wired.com.

Another caveat is that all future iPhone users must have an iTunes account in order for the phone to work “as promised”. In a recent article on paidContent.org, writer Staci Kramer stated that, “In update emails Tuesday, Apple and AT&T warned prospective users the expensive phone they lust for won’t meet expectations without an iTunes account.” While most people who have their hearts set on getting an iPhone are probably already iPod and iTunes users, the small group of non-Apple product users, will be in for a surprise. AT&T has also been slow to confirm whether or not their standard 30-day return policy will apply to the iPhone as well as whom, Apple or AT&T, will be handling the iTunes customer support issues. AT&T customers will also have to agree to a 2 year contract with the iPhone, something that was not previously standard procedure.

While there is still a little over two weeks for AT&T to get its act together, it will be interesting to see if there is a mad rush on June 29th or if consumers will be waiting a few weeks for all of the issues to be worked out. I’m still waiting for Sprint to announce they will be carrying it, yes? I won’t hold my breath.