ChasNote

I’m liking Episode 3 of the Dice-sponsored video series Best Job Ever — a profile of the engineering director at Facbook.

(Click here to play the video.)

Dice is in the business of of helping IT professionals find better jobs (and helping companies find IT professionals). Other companies are in this business too — competition, of course, isn’t a challenge Dice faces uniquely — so it’s on Dice (as it is on any other brand that faces competition) to figure out a marketing strategy that stands out from the clutter while still telling prospective customers what they do. Something to get the attention of its customers, who happen to be an ad-saturated group of people.

I’ve been a fan of Dice’s approach for some time, since the first time I saw ad creative that began with the provocative question Does Your Tech Job Suck? Forget about the sassy language; I like that Dice kicks off the conversation with its customers by asking them how they’re doing. If the answer is, “I’m not doing so well, to be honest, my job isn’t that much fun,” Dice has created a natural opportunity to pitch its services as a way to help salve that individual’s pain.

(Disclosure: I worked with Dice and its agency Modem Media on the rant banner campaign, and I’ve done business with Dice for years. I’ve also done business with Monster, Hotjobs, TheLadders and other Dice competitors.)

This latest campaign — a collaboration among Dice, its agency Publicis, FM and FM’s partners at Next New Networks — is an extension of the concept. For those IT professionals who aren’t quite miserable enough to say their current jobs suck, these video profiles introduce them to just how good the right job can be.

For most of the past year, the voices of the American Express OPEN Forum blog have come from outside business experts such as Guy Kawasaki, Anita Campbell, Techdirt and the professors at the Wharton School of Business. Recently, American Express found its own voice and added it to the conversation. Not the voice you’d expect — “Hey, check out the Gold Card!” — but a voice that sounds like a human being with some advice for small business owners.

Related: How American Express uses Twitter to reach new audiences.

Johnson & Johnson’s Acuvue contact lens brand has sponsored the development of a new feature on the Graffiti Facebook app: One click to larger, higher resolution versions of your favorite Graffitis. The Acuvue High-Res button runs at the base of every Graffiti image. (There are tens of millions of them.)

When you click on the High-Res button, a message pops up to tell you what’s about to happen — with an Acuvue ad unit to the right of the message:

And what happens is this: The Graffiti image enlarges and (because the resolution is better) comes into greater focus, like that feeling you get when you pop in your contacts and see a more focused version of yourself in the mirror. If you’re the Joker, it looks like this:

(Graffiti credit: Rainna Langley.)

(Other credits: Rob D’Alto, Scott Haldeman and Eugina Valliades at McCann; Mark Kantor and Tim Suzman at Graffiti; and Jon Ohliger, Stephanie Loleng, Jana Hartz, Michael Cohn, and Paula Pentogenis at FM. Well done!)

I’ve viewed American Express’s OPEN Forum blog as a legitimate small business publication for a long time, but, hey, I’m biased. Amex partners with FM and top SMB authors and experts (Anita Campbell, Scott Belsky, Guy Kawasaki, John Jantsch, Mike Masnick, Knowledge@Wharton, the Techdirt Insight Community, et al) to create the editorial content published on the site. (More on the FM / Amex partnership here.)

Turns out, I’m not a alone. Mainstream business publications such as the NY Times, Entrepreneur, FT and Mediapost are four that sourced Amex OPEN blog articles — this week alone.

FM worked with Verizon Wireless (and its agency, Moxie Interactive) to place Verizon ads promoting the BlackBerry Storm on Fred Wilson’s site, A VC, even though Fred had recently criticized the product on the site:

“In fact, that post which is critical of the Storm is still on the front page of this blog where the ad is running. And this blog has been no friend to wireless carriers and their abusive business models like demanding exclusives from device manufacturers.

“Conversational media and conversational marketing is coming of age. Marketers are understanding that you have to be part of the conversation even if it isn’t flattering about you and your products and services. And participants in conversational media are starting to recognize that marketers and their brands have a seat at the table and a role in the conversation. In this case, they are helping to fund it (sort of).

“Kudos to Verizon for understanding that you can’t control the content your campaign runs next to.”

An interesting conversation broke out among A VC readers, including BlackBerry fans that came to the brand’s defense and others who applauded Verizon for supporting the discussion.

“It could be very effective for Verizon. This blog hits a bullseye on the product’s target market. Plenty of people will disagree w/ Fred’s view on the Storm (I do, fairly strongly!) And there’s a LOT of people who feel married to Verizon or can’t/won’t use AT&T or T-Mo (and thus iPhone, G1 etc) and will now choose the Storm despite reservations…. I am convinced that there is TONS of potential here. People are sick and tired of all these years of ads making grandiose, inherently biased claims for their products. ‘Marketing’ as it’s done in the US has become equated w/ mistrust. I’d bet that a company’s active endorsement of a balanced discussion, pro and con, about a product will cause the public to listen rather than tune out.”

And:

“I’d be impressed if people from Verizon made this decision based on the content & context of specific posts on your blog as opposed to simply picking your site from some broad technology category.”

And this, from my FM colleague John Schneider:

“Yes, this was a conscious, and human, decision that was made. With fewer than 200 properties, FM always handpicks the best fitting sites — there are no fancy algorithms. In Fred’s case, he has an engaged and influential audience that has strong opinions on new technologies and product offerings. Ultimately, it’s Fred’s audience we are trying to reach. They clearly respect his opinions, but form their own as shown here in this comment thread.”

And:

“Well, I think it’s brilliant that you did because of the tension created by Fred’s recent post about the BlackBerry Storm. There’s hope for advertising.”

Hope for advertising?! I’m welling up over here!

Congrats to the teams at Verizon Wireless and Moxie Interactive. And thanks, John Schneider, for putting this program together, and Fred, for MC’ing the conversation.

Target has launched Christmas Wrapped, a site with tips and tricks for holiday entertaining. The tips and tricks come from home craft and parenting bloggers such as Mighty Girl, Parent Hacks and The Pioneer Woman, and Target uses the site’s advertising and promotional sections to point to gift ideas like the Home Stars and Moon Fireplace.

The concept — a retailer acting like a publisher, providing useful lifestyle tips in addition to product offers — is adding to the ranks of the I Heart Target club, like this Twitterer who felt compelled to tell her network about it:

Matt DiPietro, FM’s PR manager, surveyed the web to see if the launch of the crowdsourced-laptop-design project, WePC, made an impact on press and blog coverage for ASUS and Intel, the site’s sponsors. Was there a halo effect in which news of the WePC project got more people thinking about and talking about Intel and ASUS?

Of course, coverage of WePC itself spiked — it didn’t exist prior to the last week in October.

But press hits for “ASUS” alone also spiked the week WePC launched — up 10% over the prior week, and up more than 100% over the final week in September.

Articles and blog posts that mentioned both “ASUS” and “Intel” jumped roughly 65% versus the average week in October.

It will be interesting to watch how this plays out. The giant press bonanza hit the week of launch, which explains the peaks on these graphs. As visitors to the site build their dream-machine concepts and share those concepts (or others they like better) with friends, I wonder, will the buzz expand outward from the mainstream press and professional-grade bloggers to the far reaches of the conversational media landscape? If so, will the WePC project carry the ASUS and Intel brands with it as the bloggers chat it up?

Last week American Express announced the launch of the Economy section to its OPEN Forum site for small business owners.

“the Economy section of OPEN Forum features blog and news commentary, expert tips and advice for surviving the downturn, personal experiences from business owners across the country about how they are managing in times of the downturn and polls about what the state of the economy means for small business.”

Several leading authors (and FM partners) such as Guy Kawasaki, Anita Campbell, Mike Masnick, John Jantsch, Scott Belsky and the team at the University of Pennsylvania’s Knowlege@Wharton are contributing content.

Man, this project — sponsored by ASUS and Intel, with participation from several FM authors — is striking a chord.

Engadget.

Gizmodo.

CNET.

PC Magazine.

ZDNet.

ComputerWeekly.

PC World India.

UberGizmo.

Core77.

Geek.com.

The Tech Herald.

Salon.

Mashable.

Seachblog.

Techmeme.

FastCompany.

The Guardian.

ClickZ.

Marketing VOX.

GottaBeMobile.

Gadgetell.

The Inquirer.

(Disclosures: UberGizmo, Mashable, Core77 and Searchblog are affiliated with FM.)

From Engadget:

“True power is derived from the people, yes? Asus and Intel know this well, so they’ve launched a website called WePC, where users can draw up concepts and specs for new netbook and notebook models then argue about how fantastic or utterly impractical they are. In a sense cooperative laptop design is not new — we’ve seen groups of companies work together to develop products, and Best Buy’s Blue Label is somewhat similar to this — but Asus and Intel are going full-on populist (or at least the appearance of it) with WePC. The promise is that designers will lurk on the site and implement some ideas — probably (and thankfully) not including the ones that are completely whacked.”

My colleague Liam Boylan’s dream machine, the Waterproof Laptop:

UPDATE 11:55am: ClickZ coverage as well:

“Coming soon to a Best Buy near you: The world’s first crowdsourced computer, courtesy of Intel, IT company ASUS and Federated Media Publishing.

“The three partners yesterday launched a site called WePC.com to solicit the public’s idea on what the ideal computer would look like. Visitors to the site can upload their own ideas or discuss and vote on what others say.

“Sometime next year, Intel will review the proposals and produce computers based on the most popular suggestions — limited, of course, by what is actually possible (don’t hold out hope for a laptop that predicts stock market fluctuations).”