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Cory Doctorow is out with his new book too, Little Brother. What a week for readers who want to take their favorite online authors (like these) into the battery-free zone!
As part of its celebration of Earth Day 2008, Chevy kicked off a sponsorship of a green “group blog,” Best of the Green Web.
GM partnered with FM to scout sites that cover environmental topics — from design and trend-spotting sites such as Core77, TrendHunter, Boing Boing and Uncrate to do-it-yourself sites like Make and start-up news sites ReadWriteWeb and VentureBeat. For those of you headed to Maker Faire in San Mateo, CA, this weekend, you better arrive on your garage-built compressed air moped:
One post on the site (sourced from ReadWriteWeb) profiles a company, BadBuster, that makes a widget that grades the eco-friendliness of large, public companies — including GM. According to the widget, GM’s environmental-performance glass is a little better than half full (or, of course, nearly half empty). It’s doing better than its North American and German rivals but is still behind its Japanese competitors.
It’s refreshing to see that kind of content on a sponsored site. Clearly this is real content, not something pumped out by GM’s PR team. With its honesty it sends the message that Chevy is committing to the green conversation in a way that goes beyond “green washing.”
Announcing that it just launched a lithium-ion prototype Chevy Volt doesn’t take away from that perception either.
Credits: Adam Erhard and the GM Planworks team, along with Marcia Simmons, Matt Jessell and Jared Katzman at FM.
Intel’s sponsorship of PopURLsBlue Edition for Enterprise IT is winning fans. Marshall Kirkpatrick at ReadWriteWeb says:
“Now [PopURLs founder] Marban has partnered with Intel to create one of the most interesting ad campaigns I’ve seen in awhile, Blue.PopURLs.com. The site is a single page aggregator about hot enterprise IT news. Calm down, I know enterprise IT is boring — but the site is cool…..”
“The Intel partnership in particular is remarkable as a simple way for advertisers to deliver value to audiences in exchange for a little bit of mindshare. Next to the top enterprise software stories from around the web, you’ll find links to Intel white papers and blogs.”
I also love the disclosure attached to the post. FM manages advertising for ReadWriteWeb and Intel’s ads have been running on the site, but Marshall says he notices the campaign only after seeing Intel’s ads on another FM site, Boing Boing.
“Disclosure: The Blue ad campaign is being run through FM publishing, who also sells ads here on RWW. I just found the site through an FM ad on BoingBoing and thought it was worth writing up.”
Advertising works in mysterious ways.
Credits: The people behind this project include Thomas Marban at PopURLs; David Veneski at Intel; Josh Mattison and Jason Ratner at FM.
BMW’s Graffiti contest that invites Facebook users to color in outlines of 1-Series cars has done a few things very well.
One, ad units on Graffiti app pages within Facebook as well as websites outside of Facebook (eg, Boing Boing) are performing better because the campaign invites participation.
Two, it enlists a core group of active social-network participants (more than 9000 submissions in the first 7 days) into a fun, transparent evangelism effort: Participants spend, in many cases, hours personalizing images of BMWs that they then share with friends.
Three, it takes advantage of the friend-to-friend newsfeed mechanism at Facebook to spread word of the campaign beyond the paid media program.
Four, the concept and the images themselves are capturing the attention of bloggers, columnists and Twitterers, such as Facebook’s Dave Morin. Ben Barren’s headline captures it best: “i found a blog post about a twitter about bmw’s facebook campaign.” UPDATE 4/7: Stuart Elliott at NT Times dedicates a column to the campaign. Others pick-ups below.
I also love that BMW’s advertising in other areas of Facebook (through Facebook, not FM) integrates a single message across multiple media plans. With the Graffiti contest BMW built a killer idea that resonates especially with existing Facebook members, so why not show the Facebook audience that you’re hip to the applications they all enjoy? Here are some banners BMW ran elsewhere on Facebook:
Credits: The team that made this happen includes Brendan Starr at GSD&M; Jon Lor at DotGlu; Mark Kantor, Tim Suzman and Ted Suzman at Graffiti Wall; Jean Aw at NOTCOT; and FM’s Jen Tamez, Marcia Simmons, Liam Boylan, Matt Jessell and Lester Lee.
A small sampling of other coverage:
Auto site Top Speed:
Han D Work blog:
Blog post and Twitter from Inusual Network:
As BMW looks to the web to build buzz for the 1-Series, it is giving its video commercials an added boost: BMW is sponsoring Boing Boing TV with pre-roll “sponsored by” billboards and full commercials mid-segment. When Boing Boing fans embed episodes in their own sites (like I’ve done here), BMW’s campaign rides on Boing Boing’s viral coattails.
On Boing Boing TV’s site, this BMW banner runs alongside the video player.
From a Lee Gomes piece in the Wall Street Journal (I saw it at Boing Boing):
“What is it about a Web site that might make it literally irresistible? Clues are offered by research conducted by Irving Biederman, a neuroscientist at the University of Southern California, who is interested in the evolutionary and biological basis of the human need for information…..
“When he hooked up volunteers to a brain-scanning machine, the preferred pictures [ones that “presented new information that somehow needed to be interpreted”] were shown to generate much more brain activity than the unpreferred shots. While researchers don’t yet know what exactly these brain scans signify, a likely possibility involves increased production of the brain’s pleasure-enhancing neurotransmitters called opioids.”
I’m no scientist, but this suggests to me that ads built around content (like JCPenney’s or Symantec’s) will do a better job engaging consumers than ads that simply offer up a discounted rate.
The Guardian UK is out with their list of favorite 50 blogs, including several official “friends of FM”:
Boing Boing: “Their dominance of the terrain where technology meets politics makes the Boing Boing crew geek aristocracy.”
TechCrunch: “Techcrunch began in 2005 as a blog about dotcom start-ups in Silicon Valley, but has quickly become one of the most influential news websites across the entire technology industry.”
Dooce: “Though there were personal websites that came before hers, certain elements conspired to make Dooce one of the biggest public diaries since Samuel Pepys’s (whose diary is itself available, transcribed in blog form, at Pepysdiary.com).”
Mashable: “Founded by Peter Cashmore in 2005, Mashable is a social-networking news blog, reporting on and reviewing the latest developments, applications and features available in or for MySpace, Facebook, Bebo and countless lesser-known social-networking sites and services, with a special emphasis on functionality.”
Gaping Void: “Things started going gangbusters when he pimped his cartoons on the internet, and as he built an audience through his blog, he started writing about his other passion — the new world of understanding how to adapt marketing to the new world of the net.”
From LA Times:
“Then in February, [Talking Heads founder David] Byrne came to town. The musician, who was here on a layover, tried to visit the popular hipster technology blog Boing Boing. The site was blocked by the airport’s Internet administrator for falling into the category of ‘Incidental Nudity, Blogs/Wiki.’
“Byrne commended the airport for its free wireless but wrote about the incident on his blog.
“Boing Boing, by many measures the most-read blog on the Internet, linked to Byrne’s post. The local alternative weekly spotted it and blogged about the mushrooming controversy….
“[Boing Boing editor Xeni] Jardin and others at Boing Boing have been on a crusade against Web-filtering software, which she noted is used by repressive governments such as Saudi Arabia and Sudan. She said Boing Boing evidently became classified as offensive by some filters because it once showed an image of the cover of a design book that replicated the cover of a risque men’s magazine.”
Here’s the Guardian UK on “the new wave of cyber celebrities” — Joanne Colan from Rocketboom, Alex Albrecht from Diggnation, Mark Frauenfelder and Xeni Jardin from Boing Boing TV, and the eponymous Ze Frank.
Coinciding with the launch of a new sponsorship program on Boing Boing (Microsoft’s sponsorship of mobile posts), Boing Boing founder and editor Mark Frauenfelder explains how his site can accept ads without corrupting the site’s editorial integrity. Turns out, the approach at Boing Boing is a lot like the approach at NY Times, the BBC and CNN.
