The friend of the average Facebook user sees the status update first. You know this section, Scott is…and then a Twitter like commentary on what is going on in Scott’s life at that exact moment. As a user of Facebook, I see the status field as nothing more than a comedic outlet. As I fancy myself an amateur comedian, I like to use it to try out new material and solicit a response from my friends. Here are some of my recent status updates:
1. Scott is still sitting at the gate at O’Hare and remembers why United sucks.
2. Scott wants to know why I’m being served with Alice Cooper ads. Behavioral targeting my ass.
3. Scott is in Geneva. It would help to be able to say more than “hello” in French.
4. Scott just ran around Lake Geneva. The real one, not the one in Wisconsin.
5. Scott finds the FinallyFast.com commercials on par with those from Life Alert (“ALL senior citizens should have Life Alert.”).
Comedic genius? Probably not, but go watch that Life Alert commercial. It brings back memories of the Clapper. But I like to have fun with it, as I think most people do.
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Cross posted on Logic + Emotion
Upon arriving back home from a week-long vacation, I was unpleasantly surprised to return to a house with no cable, internet or phone service. This came at especially bad timing as my wife had recently lost her mobile phone. After calling our provider (Comcast) and getting a generic message about an outage, (post navigating through the confusing phone menu) I opted to wait it out for the afternoon as the recording recommended.
By evening we had no service and after waiting on the line again I had finally gotten through only to get the expected “we’ll send a technician between the hours of…” message. The Comcastic puppets couldn’t put a smile on my face at this point (actually, they’ve always creeped me out), but Frank – a Comcast employee who provides customer service on Twitter did.
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Originally published at Ad Age, Digital Next
If there’s one type of headline that gets attention, it’s about claiming the death of something. Well, I’d like to proclaim the “un-dead” nature of a format that I think has the potential to become something more powerful than we are currently seeing.
The microsite was adopted by the marketing community as a tool of convenience. Continuing to add sections to our large company/product websites every time we wanted to promote a new product, feature or service simply became too unwieldy. And specifically for advertisers, well, they needed an online extension for their campaigns to live in the digital space.
And so the formula had begun. Launch a campaign, build a microsite, buy online media to drive traffic to it. Everything was in its place – advertisers now had a presence on the web, clients were happy about it, and the big money was still being pumped into the traditional channels because that’s how it’s always been done. In the past year lots of us have had a grand ol’ time proclaiming the death of the microsite, and with some validity. Fact is, the internet is littered with thousands of them and the majority are either promotional in nature, designed to win awards vs. serving up value, or simply provide no incentive to ever return to them. On top of that, most of the microsites I come across are difficult to use, take way too much time to load, crash my browser or use contrived marketing language written by professionals who have spent years perfecting their craft.
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