I love these embed-able ad units that feature longer-form video programming (here’s Dell’s), this one from a section of Cisco’s Welcome to the Human Network site that FM is helping them with:
I also love to see brands that are world-class for skills other than publishing or programming move themselves into the world-class-publisher category through partnership. Coming in August, Cisco’s site will feature special episodes of video programming from Boing Boing TV, Webb Alert and Mashable.
(The team that put this together includes Radhika Narang, Mike Kisch and Melinda Walker at Cisco; Lashena Huddleston, Sue McCarthy, and Lauren Amato at Neo; and Matt Jessell, Liam Boylan, James Gross, Stephanie Loleng, Karleen Engel and Lester Lee at FM.)
DeVry University has launched a marketing site that invites visitors to submit ideas for a video game you’d like to play. My entry, Email Invaders, works likes this:
“The game looks like a standard email inbox, with new emails stacking up at an alarming rate (each one making that spine-chilling “bing” noise). But instead of having to read them, you shoot them like space invaders of Atari fame, and they shatter into bits before evaporating. Special keystrokes would allow you to shoot dozens with a single shot. Bonus points for hitting emails with attachments. Unlike conventional video games, where finishing a wave immediately advances players to the next wave, players of Email Invaders are “rewarded” by getting a 24-hours pause to the game — no new emails for a full day. The next, more difficult wave becomes available the next day.”
Please, give me your votes. I want to win the XBOX and — more importantly — be featured on WebbAlert!
All of us at FM are feeling the benefits of conversational marketing more directly as of today: As part of a broader sponsorship deal, Rackspace has offered discounted hosting services to all FM sites, including our own blog!
Morgan Webb’s daily tech and gaming news program WebbAlert launched on Rackspace back in August, and Battelle’s Searchblog is moving over shortly as well.
This doesn’t mean every FM site is required to change its hosting solution, if its current situation is working. It means that Rackspace understands the “federated” model, and it’s giving leading, independent authors the opportunity to tap enterprise-grade IT services (and pricing terms), even though they’re not yet giant enterprises.
My colleague James Gross put together a great program that paired Diggnation with Ask.com. From James:
“Ask.com wanted to engage with the ‘cultural antennas’ that can be found at Digg by driving consideration for their search engine by showing off their new, rich interface. (One of those cultural antennas, Morgan Webb, apparently watches Diggnation.) By working with Diggnation’s rock stars (check out the video, they really are) Ask.com was able to give the Diggnation community bonus video of backstage footage from the Diggnation London launch. The sponsorship video went live on Friday night and within 3 hours it had over 200 diggs [now over 300, ed.] and was on the home page of Digg.com
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“The only way to see the video was to go to Ask.com and type in Diggnation (here’s the Ask.com results page). This allowed Ask to show off some of the new features of their search engine, including their rich media interface that differentiates their services in many ways from their competitors.
“During the sponsored episode Kevin and Alex show off Ask.com’s new features around blogs, smart search, media, news and more.”
And he launched a blog — called My Free HP Blackbird 002, nice win for HP if Cannis builds a following — to tell the world how he learned about HP’s marketing campaign and the Blackbird give-away. He promises to share photos soon.
“I’m a computer geek, I spend all of my days working with routers, and firewalls, and hotspot captive portals, and I go home and I fool around with routers, firewalls, hotspot captive portals, and World of Warcraft. So there I am sitting on my arse watching some episodes of Diggnation that I had missed and browsing http://digg.com/, when I notice a small video in the upper right hand corner of the Digg interface. The clip grabbed my attention because it’s highlight frame was a Gnome Mage just chillin and it looked like he was going to do something cool.”
It sounds like Blackbird 002 landed in capable hands!
HP is releasing a limited number of its new high-end gaming PCs, aka Blackbird, and inviting gamers to “tell us about the coolest mods you’ve seen. Brag about your ultimate gaming machine….” on a wiki site, Blackbird.wikia.com. The site includes videos from Jimmy Wales, Joi Ito, Morgan Webb and the Diggnation crew, Kevin Rose and Alex Albrecht — videos that were created to run in their respective video programs (as paid commercials) or websites (as paid banner ads). I especially like the clip from Diggnation, when Kevin calls the gaming box “Blackboard” instead of “Blackbird,” and Alex explains the difference between the two.
