YouTube Copyrighted, hence pulled down? Thanks to YouTube !!

A story when your beloved cheats on you !! This video of Laura Ross was pulled down from general viewing by You Tube for reasons not known to her. Was the video copyrighted by You Tube? How can they simply pull it down?


http://www.youtube.com/v/wrMq46rbWNk&hl=en&fs=1


This video is not available for public viewing anymore hence only the link is provided (view the video till it is available on the link).

Whose tweet is it anyway !!!

Recently, tweet is becoming a big craze amongst many marketers. Marketers are actively building twittable stories as a part of their overall marketing plan, almost like the good old storyboards that we took to the clients for approvals before shooting a television commercial. Infact Twitting is like a half-brother to Facebook and a very potent tool for first hand honest customer research, testing and dip test.

Mark Cuban posted a note on his blog enquiring if Tweets are copyrighted. My simple answer to that is 'NO'. The web world is all about providing exposure, dissemination and there is no chance for control. Those of you who are aware, two years ago when someone had posted the secret encrypted code on Digg that was used to unlock copyrighted DVDs of major labels, overnight, that Digg post's rank rose to the top spot on its homepage. Users were hitting the Digg homepage like swarms of bees. Sensing the impending danger Kevin Rose, the founder of Digg had to immediately put the post on the block and pulled it down from Digg to protect his company from a certain law suit. That act created so much of an uproar that Digg was neck deep in negative comments from it's most loyal and trusted followers. Further the damage was so wide spread that before Kevin could bring the post down, the encrypted code had already multiplied across the World Wide Web. Who on earth would have thought about that impact ! It wasn’t even Digg’s fault. Kevin had no choice but to reinstate the post the very next day. Then he sat down to write a famous blog (see link below) that underlined the fact that there is no such thing as copyrighted content on WWW, no matter how much time, energy and resources legal stalwarts and CEO of corporations spend to craft one to protect themselves or / from their customers.

We have never bothered to remember the name of the person who first posted the encrypted code on Digg. Neither did he get the post copyrighted nor is he earning dollars today on the impact it had. But what we remember is only the BIG bloodbath, that followed thereafter. Surely, there is no copyrighted content or post on the WWW.

Marketers, while Tweets are your best friends, it can be your worst enemy too. Exercise caution while you build a Twittable story for your brand or organization. Ensure you have covered your a** and have an exit plan or plan B in place as well, that can be implemented smoothly and quickly to protect your interests.

Kevin's blog post after the bloodbath - http://blog.digg.com/?p=74

Fondling Sixth Sense...

Recently a young Indian PhD researcher at MIT invented a unique tool that attempts to bridge the gap between the real world and the digital world through an interface built using a maze of codes and data. It’s a tool that you can carry wherever you go just like your own mobile phone. It’s got a projector (mirror), a camera that acts like a human eye and computer vision software which has a capacity to rattle out millions of complex algorithms in seconds. The software is built to identify multi-touch freehand and iconic human gestures by users wearing photosensitive colored caps on human fingers and hands. The kit can be attached to mobile phone device connected to the Internet and BOOM!! A whole new way of browsing opens up right in front of you. You now suddenly do not need a computer monitor to surf the Internet. You can do so on any projecting surface around you.


Further the device is an intelligent contraption which has the capability to identify not just basic hand gestures but also read / recognize products or text or information using image recognition or marker technology and immediately connect you to the Internet to provide you with valuable information available there on the subject.


Isn't that fascinating?


Now although the product is still deep in research and unlikely to be available commercially very soon, it does leave us, marketers thinking of ways and means of leveraging the invention for digital savvy clients. I did a knit picking of my brain and came up with a few usages / implications...

Cost per Conversion (CPC)?: Imagine you happen to visit your friendly neighborhood Wal-Mart on a Sunday morning to pick up replenishments for the week ahead. You suddenly see and fall in love with the latest range of hi-end notebooks from Dell and wish to pick up one immediately. While you compare the product through customer reviews on ZDNet, Amazon and the other reliable stalwart websites using Sixth Sense, you suddenly realize that the same notebook is available cheaper by about $100 on dell.com. And what's more, delivery in your area is guaranteed within the next 24 hours. So what's in it for you? Healthy competition between Wal-Mart and dell.com is always good for the customers - a classic case of price war between products available online as against a brick and mortar shop. What's in it for Dell? Almost no CPC, right! Real time dynamic online pricing enables volume off takes. Higher ROI, efficient targeting and more opportunities for brand building!

Geo targeting is the King's wise man: The advantage is now for both the parties. Both the marketing brand as well the king, the Customer get benefitted. So no more, mobile GPS is invasion of privacy, as the law chooses to call in some countries. Geo targeting is now mutually beneficial! King is likely to give up his privacy and open up windows to massive targeting which hitherto was restricted.

Convergence at its best: We all know that mobile communication and broadcast technology innovators around the world like NTT Docomo, Nokia, Vodafone have done tones of work in the past decade on wireless convergence. Over the years while technology became more and more superior, the human-end interface that took advantage of that technology became more and more smaller and more and more powerful. The ability of Sixth Sense to project screens on any surface is really not new as there are contraptions available dime a dozen which have that ability. Further the technology to track movement of photosensitive colored caps is in itself quite an old technique that forms a base for the study, called interaction design. But what sets Sixth Sense apart is its ability to leverage or converge all those technological innovations under one roof and build a contraption. Do we hear a distant cry of a slow and painful death of WAP enabled websites?

Does SEM on Google go beyond KWs?: Google, better shape up or ship out !!! Larry Page and Sergey Brin and their armory of experts need to do a bit of deep thinking here as Sixth Sense has the potential to wipe out their biggest share of their worth on NASDAQ. Do we see SEM on Google going beyond just KWs or even further than reverse image search that is available at http://tineye.com/. Do we see an outright buy out of the product patent in the offing? Or do we see an all new Google Earth? Only time will tell.


Click here read the blog owned by the creator himself, Pranav Mistry....http://blog.ted.com/2009/03/sixth_sense_pranav.php

My first serious blog - I start with something closest to my heart, my profession and source of my daily bread, the digital world...

While digital footprints of brand marketing is expanding rapidly all over the world, I still find myself explaining to my best clients, the merits of the medium everytime I present a thought or a brand strategy. I find myself building atleast 10-15 slides on my presentation deck purely showcasing the various case studies relevant to the point in discussion. That's kinda frustrating and annoying !!



Case in point - A client from a local market in my region who is a large global corporation in IT and electronic goods manufacturing came to me with a problem that is very common . Sure ! the client corporation name is open to speculation here. He said "I launched a website 6 months ago but people do not come to my site unless I spend thousands of dollars in promoting the website". Worst still, analysis told us that the time spent on the site was poor and the bounce rate was shooting upwards. We went down to explore the website. We found to our dismay that the content on the website has been the same as it was the day the site went live, 6 months ago. Clearly, the client failed to craft a content strategy. Besides, although there was a data capture feature but sadly, it only collected data, never to be utilised.


Sometime ago, the director of marketing of another entertainment television channel once told me that one of his competition was succesfully using Facebook to promote its new reality show that saw its rating points challenge the rating points of an ongoing popular sports series shown live on television. The director knew that he needed to explore the SNS for his next launch but did not know how.


If you happen to face some of these desparate, yet embarressed souls, do not blow your top. Alas !! that's what we are there for, to guide and direct them. After all, that's where we earn our daily bread right !!


In the next series of my blog posts, I will try to post real life stories and experiences, that should help provide possible solutions to challenges that readers may face in their markets. I would also post my understanding and take on latest discoveries, fads, craze and clicking mania. I hope to create a differentiated blog amidst the copious number of digital blogs in the WWW through real experiences and examples that I continue to encounter in my profession.

Cheers