We humans always find a way to make technology work for us. And so do scammers.
Today I got a neat one that uses the old PayPal phish tactic seasoned with a nice dose of social discomfort [my bolds]:
"We recorded a payment request from "Live Strip Chat Camera Sexy Girls -www.video-chat.co.uk - Girls Show" to enable the charge of $127.34 on your PayPal account. Because the order was made from an european internet address, we put an Exception Payment on transaction id #POS 03 4573 motivated by our Geographical Tracking System. THE PAYMENT IS PENDING FOR THE MOMENT . If you made this transaction or if you just authorize this payment, please ignore or remove this email message. The transaction will be shown on your monthly statement as "Live Strip Chat Camera Sexy Girls". If you didn't make this payment and would like to decline the $127.34 billing to your card, please follow the link below to cancel the payment : Cancel this payment <http://www.eurons.org/Media/comedy/Jirekhurshani/bb.jpg/> ( transaction id #POS 03 4573)
Thank you for using PayPal! The PayPal Team
Niiiiice. Porn payment you only need to respond to if you DON'T WANT TO PAY. Brrrrr. Do they do gender targeting for this thing?
Clicking the link got me here: (note the language drop down selection...):
Clearly targeted to US dimwits like myself. I don't speak "Espaol" or "??(??)", so I rambled around in the source code for a bit before Firefox threw me a warning window.
Check out this Alexa-fueled world map showing each county's top-ranked social net by traffic. Useful, though each country shows only the highest trafficked site (not most registrants, page views, etc.) My favorite is the changes in the social net standings called like sports scores - apparently, since September 2008:
I'll go out on a limb here. I'm going to try to crystallize a concept I've been wrestling with. That others have already wrestled with, probably better than I. And this will be a jumble. And I'll try to glean meaning later. But for now...
Fact: We live in a cultural-technological blender. And if there ever was a clear distinction between our virtual ("meetspaces") lives and our real world ("meatspace") lives, that's kinda going out the window. The rise of "Alternate Reality Games" hinges on the novelty and exciting possibilities of this blur - but that novelty is fast becoming the norm.
RWW tells us some kids (and their uber competitive parents) are resorting to "Facebook Sabotage" to hurt rivals for college admissions. A 43-year old Japanese woman is jailed for "murdering" the avatar of of her ex-"virtual" husband (the two weren't married in real life, btw). Remember the MySpace "Cyber Bully" mom that may have pushed a child she felt had wronged her own to suicide? Our world is becoming layered with real and digitally fueled interconnections. By augmenting and enhancing our perception of our "virtual" worlds - we augment the real thing.
It's gorgeously hyper-accelerated techno-cultural Darwinism at work. We wet-hack the new software and hardware we've created and had inflicted on us to imbue it with our humanity.
In this blur, 'Ambient Intimacy' is touted as one of the results of our ability to digitally connect to more people than ever. But "Ambient intimacy" without "Edge Consciousness" is mass distraction.
By way of example, we talk about something similar with brands - we highlight the morph away from brand as "destination" (e.g. a website awaiting your arrival to cocoon you in marketing speak) to the concept of "distributed brand experiences" (e.g., a brand making itself relevant to you where YOU are)
In "Edge Consciousness", I don't create a spiderweb of digital connections to await 'activity' (e.g., an interesting bit through my RSS aggregator, a new video in my youtube channel, a text message) to draw me out of the center...rather, I use digital connectivity to project my consciousness...I AM my web of interconnection, and I constantly scan the entirety - passively and actively. What makes "Edge Consciousness" powerful is that I can bring the full force of my engagement to ANY POINT in that web.
From the "30,000 foot view" of Friend Feed/FB Newsfeed ogling, to macro-zoom immediacy. 'Ambient Intimacy' enables near-instantaneous global group formation around specific issues. Edge Consciousness is that crystallization made actively personal. Your soul on Akamai servers.
This gem in my e-mail box, next to two Nigerian e-scams, from a "Flash Marketing" sales rep:
Dear Renny.gleeson
Do you want the top position in the major search engines? We will
give you a free site review and show you why we are the best at getting
you the most. Email us today at [name redacted]@gmail.com and include
the best way to contact you.
Sincerely,
[name redacted]
Flash Marketing
Ahhh...the power of search meets the power of spam? Crap like this gives us all a bad name. And news flash, Flash: I don't write my name with a period. very. often.
Your phone doesn't run out of power - it dies. Because at this point in time, we've jammed about as much of our lives into those handly little pocket rockets as we can. When you lose the juice, you lose a piece of who you are. And actually LOSING one? Well, I've ALMOST lost one, and it froze my gut solid.
So what would you do if you found somebody else's Nokia, loaded with their life? Someone...kinda interesting? Would you check it out? Would it be creepy? Interesting? Bizarre? Racy? Intense?
Google's Eric Schmidt's spoke to attendees of the American Magazine Conference about why he believed the "high quality content" of branded magazines was desperately needed online:
"There is a danger", Schmidt
exclaimed, of the Internet “becoming a cesspool...in a world
of disinformation, which is the future, brands are the
solution. Brand affinity is hard wired and fundamental to the human
condition – who you trust and who you don’t. People want real value,
real information, real leadership and messages of hope."
I believe him, because while YOU may still not have found what you're looking for, Schmidt KNOWS what you look for every day. And exactly how much it's worth. And YouTube just passed Yahoo in terms of daily searches? Jeepers. I swear I only look for funny cat videos and Hifana joints:
Handcuffs, Decomposing Zombie sours, lotion, condoms and mints - or as we call it "the basement of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs". You can learn a lot about a culture by what they choose to stuff their vending machines with, and based on this one, I LOVE the Finns. And if you're inspired, join my "What's in My Vending Machine" vend-o-rific spin on "What's in Your Bag".
BTW - The Hotel Katajanokka used to be referred to as "the Nokk", and you could buy "Nokk: Connecting People" t-shirts featuring two hands cuffed together. Those Finns.
Nokia acquired a social mapping tool called Plazes a little ways back. Here's the embeddable widget that feeds back the info on my location to my stalkers, my mom and Interpol. I've configured the little bugger (via a Mac-compatible MaemoPlazer) to auto-sniff my location when I boot up, then post the damning geo-goods to both my Twitter and Skype accounts. As well as this little baby. Privacy Schmivacy.
When I first heard about Google’s Knols project a while back, I was concerned that a user-generated “encyclopedia”, unmoderated and fueled by ad revenue for its creators, and served to an unsuspecting population in Google's own organic search results based on (a) link popularity and (b) personal search histories, had the potential to create an info-cocoon of self-reinforcing biases on topics like abortion, gun control, and affirmative action.
"These
Knols have now started to take the Internet by storm - after all they
are served by Google and contain a vast amount of knowledge so it only
makes sense that they would start dominating the search engines." - the Google Knol Guide
In a society that fields a vice-presidential candidate who believes in the Rapture, I felt Knols was the kind of project with the potential to change the Internet “marketplace of ideas” into a warren of extremist rabbit holes.
His book describes the tech- and culture-fueled “ascendancy of belief over fact”, and he makes the case that not only can we now choose to believe what we want in spite of facts to the contrary, there is an industry growing up to exploit our propensity for factual relativism. Referring to the “Swift Boat Veterans for Truth” effort that may well have cost Kerry the 2004 election, Manjoo points to a “critical danger in our infosphere”:
“People who successfully manipulate today’s fragmented media landscape can dissemble, distort, exaggerate, fake – essentially, they can lie – to more people, more effectively, than ever before.”
And this hasn’t just led to polarized viewpoints – Manjoo posits that we dynamically construct our reality by knitting together the bits and pieces that reinforce our personal worldview (“selective exposure” leading to "biased assimilation"), and discard those that don’t.
Net, we have arrived at a time and a place in our society where we are arguing not about ideas, but about reality itself.
Or as Manjoo puts it: “Welcome to the Rashomon world, where the very idea of objective reality is under attack.”
Truthiness
Manjoo, citing Stephen Colbert, warns of the corrosive rise of “truthiness”:
“Truthiness means you choose. But you aren’t just deciding a reality, you are deciding to trust that reality – which means deciding to distrust others. Whenever you choose, you’re making a decision to form a particularized trust. This is the essence of the new medium”.
This isn’t just an interesting intellectual exercise - the UK recently passed the Unfair Commercial Practices Directive (UCPD), meant to bring UK advertising practices in line with EU directives current and future, that render illegal many "covert marketing techniques". Paid content must be identified as such. Brands and their agencies can't masquerade as normal folks to extol their product virtues in chat rooms. No social network profiles for characters in commercials, “leaked” guerrilla YouTube videos or bloggers paid to surreptitiously push your commercial agenda. What will DCI group do if that law gets passed here? SImple - they won't LET it get passed here.
From the standpoint of brand experiences and brand communications, all this highlights one of the dangers inherent in the interactive gospel we preach: social media and interactive communications can be used for good or evil. One can use these tools to tell brand stories, or lie. Or both.
In Common Sense, Thomas Paine noted "The more men have to lose, the less willing they are to venture."
Our industry has a lot to gain by the shifts in the communications landscape. But if we aren't careful, we have a lot to lose, too.
Our communications institutions, by and large, weren't built to leverage the full-contact engagement enabled by emergent technology platforms - nor the very real socio-economic systems those virtual tools are creating. And at the same time, the financial infrastructure that supports our industry,
and the brands
it services, is still playing catch-up to the on-the ground realities we face - as any interactive shop not getting to staff an account person because the traditional agency already has one on the roster has run into this challenge. And others.
Our ideas must be aided and abetted by multi-channel transmedia storytellers. The skill sets necessary for brand engagement in an always-on world are different. A provocative relationship requires truths, deep human insights, engaging narrative and emotive power. But the very notion of what constitutes a relationship is in flux as we are assimilated by the borg.
That's why it irked me recently at the DLX Summit to hear interactive media agencies and publishers focused on teasing efficiencies out of their systems - "oh, we need a streamlined IO process", "oh, we need a streamlined RFP process", "oh, we need a GRP equivalent".
Bullpuckey.
That's navelgazing incrementalism.
It's frantically slapping a fresh coat of paint on the gazebo before the hurricane hits.
If you thought getting your IO's in order was the solution to the challenges our industry faces, seriously, go home.
But it's hard for media and creative agencies to imagine a landscape that doesn't look like the one they just spent all this time and money building. Frankly, they aren't incented to. They've invested as heavily in the communication delivery systems and techniques as brands are in the pseudo-science of "brand management" percehed precariously atop reams of best guesstimates about media effectiveness.
While everyone tries to batten down the hatches (typically checking off the "innovation" item in their annual reviews with a single, crappy, non-scaleable CYA "mobile" campaign), real innovation is happening. Smaller nimble shops good and pure evil are wrapping their heads around the space. And redefining it. And while our business - influence - will not change, I believe the fundamental tools, techniques and metrics of our business will be radically reconsidered from the edge in. Agencies bound to the quarterly targets of Wall Street are at a disadvantage to the nimble crazy mofos unafraid to screw with their models, break/shake 'em up regularly, because that's what's happening in the marketplace of ideas, isn't it?
Look at music. Yep, Music. Music labels, too, sit on significant infrastructural investments in manufacturing and distribution suddenly obviated and torched by digital distribution. So they've spent the last few years trying to litigate their way out of a forest fire.
But from the conflagration has emerged a whole flock of promising phoenixs (or is that phoenii?) And I believe we marketers have a lot to learn from the music business and the new models emerging there.
Here was Trent Reznor's "Common Sense".
How crazy has it gotten? Plenty crazy.
Acts as diverse as Radiohead, Trent Reznor and Jill Sobule have successfully explored fan-financed albums and direct sales to fans.
And remember Radiohead's Google data visualization tool video?
While the labels continue to innovate ways to shoot themselves in the foot, artists are fighting it out bareknuckled, looking for a buck, building relationships and reinventing both music and "marketing".
Pretty cool, right?
Now it's our turn to reinvent brand communications. Right freaking now.
. 
