“In today’s increasingly saturated product marketplace, surface appeal is not enough to elevate me-too products or services above the pack, or to yield sustained success. The harder trick is to use design to get beneath that superficial marketing level and to delve down to core business issues such as: What do people really need? And how can we best provide that?

That business should be focused on offering goods and services people actually want and need may seem obvious. Why would companies do otherwise? The reason is that they often are focused more on their own existing capabilities and objectives than on the needs of others.”

- Warren Berger, GLIMMER: How Design Can Transform Your Life, and Maybe Even The World, pg 100

From the description on youtube:

zenfilm — June 09, 2010 — The Ford Fiesta Movement Mission 4 film from Team Houston “Pause” presents an unusual twist on romance with sci-fi/fantasy overtones. Pause was filmed in one day by the Zenfilm creative team and features the sights and sounds of America’s 4th largest city set to the music of Houston artists Southern Backtones and Tyagaraja. To vote for this film in the competition simply text “Zenfilm” to 44144 . There will be no spam… we promise. Thanks for your support.

In the process of explaining SEO (search engine optimization) over the years I frequently demonstrate that if you Google “God in Houston” the top results are not churches. Now I’m not talking about the local results that show the churches, but the actual search results below that that lists KSBJ as the top result for “God in Houston” when searched on Google. And the only paid search result is for “Houston Gold” – like the shiny stuff you make jewelry out of. Here is a screen shot:

From a technical perspective, this makes perfect sense. Because the largest churches in Houston do not mention the word “God” on their web sites. Yes really. Using a search engine keyword analyzer, a test of second.org shows the following.

Note the title is “Second Baptist Church, Houston, TX.” Thus they will likely rank for “Churches in Houston” but not for “God in Houston.” A simple fix would be to update the title to “Second Baptist Church, Serving God in Houston TX”.

I mention this because exactness of speech matters. It means that some of our largest churches have zero (0) possibility of being returned if a downtrodden person googles for them in the middle of the night. It means missed connections when a bible study group at a particular church might be the perfect connection for a fellow Houstonian. But we will never know because of a failure of exactness of speech.

On the flip side, a tip of the hat to Braeswood Assembly of God church which comes up for both the physical location and second natural ranking after KSBJ in the search results. And all because they mention the word “God” in their title.

So be specific. Be exact. And I’ll leave it to you to search for the ministers’ names – they rank a bit higher than God.

New Media Communications Model from PR 2.0. An evolved version of Lasswell’s model per the book:

Who
Says what
In which channel
To whom
To what effect
Then who
Hears what
Who shares what
With what intent
To what effect

Explained in greater detail in PR 2.0, Solis, Breakenridge. pg 190. This is mostly a note to myself as I wonder about how to measure such things in the Personal Brand Era.

What started in 2007 as the Tendenci User Conference, was canceled in 2008 due to a very unwelcome hurricane, has now morphed into SchipulCon 2009. Planned by @MagsMac, the conference has a great lineup of speakers including Deirdre Breakenridge, the author of PR 2.0.

The full SchipulCon 2009 Agenda is posted on the site. And registration is here.

And of course a HUGE thanks to our sponsors without which this would not be happening!

The company is 12 years old today. Wow. What a journey so far!

A huge THANK YOU to our clients, our employees and all of our supporters over the last 12 years. Black swans do exist, and thrive, with a lot of help from their friends. THANK YOU!

We’ll have a party after SchipulCon 09 to celebrate. But I had to post to mark the occasion. Thanks again y’all.

I am a fan of Facebook. I enjoy using it and it has brought me closer to a lot of awesome people. We are even approaching 1000 people on our Facebook Fan Page!

But I can’t handle Facebook’s lack of respect for our privacy. The fact that it shows me “dating website” advertisements (I’m married and they KNOW this!?) even after I mark them “thumbs down” and “irrelevant” or sometimes even “offensive.” Yet they return.

In response to previous privacy concerns, Facebook launched a charm offensive for better Facebook Governance. As someone who studies PR, this was a smart thing to do. Start by listening and their blog in fact did request feedback. Great job! But wait! There’s more!

A few months go by and this poor chap finds a dating advertisement on his Facebook profile featuring a photo of HIS WIFE! Not cool. At all. Facebook’s response on the unauthorized use of the photos is:

In the past couple of days, a rumor has begun spreading that claims we have changed our policies for third-party advertisers and the use of your photos. These rumors are false, and we have made no such change in our advertising policies.

If you see a Wall post or receive a message with the following language or something similar, it is this false rumor:

FACEBOOK has agreed to let third party advertisers use your posted pictures WITHOUT your permission.

The advertisements that started these rumors were not from Facebook but placed within applications by third parties. Those ads violated our policies by misusing profile photos, and we already required the removal of those deceptive ads from third-party applications before this rumor began spreading.

I feel for them. But the answer seems weak – it wasn’t us. It was a third party. And we stopped the practice AFTER y’all complained about it. The weak link in the chain here is the facebook application provider. I’d like to see two things change to improve security and privacy on facebook.

1. Facebook needs to be explicit about the “reputation” of a particular application provider or advertiser. Make this transparent. I LOVE the “report this” next to the advertisements, but as I mentioned above, for me they are ignoring my feedback. And why can’t I see EVERYONE’S feedback on an application or an advertisement? Would this type of transparency be a bad thing?
2. We, the Facebook customers, need to uninstall as many applications as possible. We need to uninstall these unnecessary Facebook applications for our own safety until we can see more transparency. Just remove them. Only add back the necessary ones. So many people remove the box from their profile and THINK they have removed the application. They have not!

We propose September 1st 2009 as Uninstall Facebook Applications Internationally Day (UFAID).

Not all applications mind you, just the ones you don’t trust or recognize.

To uninstall your Facebook Applications follow these steps:

1. Login to Facebook
2. Click on your “Profile” link at the top of the page.
3. Scroll down to the “Applications” link on the lower left. Click it.
4. Click “Edit Apps” link which should take you to a page like this: http://www.facebook.com/editapps.php
5. IMPORTANT Change “Show” from “Recently Used” to “Authorized”!
6. Click the “X” next to the applications you want to remove.
7. Confirm.
8. Repeat until all cruft and untrustworthy applications are removed.

Find any applications you did not realize were installed? Yup, thought you would. Put them in the comments below so we can see the sneaky ones?

As a favor, made some revisions to the Saint Arnold Facebook Fan Page. Become a fan!

Free laptops are good. Yup, call it a material incentive on top of social motivation, but we are giving away a free laptop to one of the fans of the Schipul Facebook page on June 30th 2009. Get the details here!

In steps:

1. Read the blog post on the free laptop giveaway for fans of the Schipul FB page. Comments are appreciated but the winner will be selected from the FB fans.
2. Become a fan by clicking the “become a fan” link on our page.
3. Wait until June 30th and wooooot!

Fine print is on the blog. Short version is fans on the FB page, excluding employees and immediate family (sorry! But we’ll make it up to y’all), selected at random. Read the details here!

Well it took me half a week, but here is the full video of our panel from the Mom2Summit last weekend. The title was “It’s the end of marketing as we know it. And we feel fine.” First the full video.

Panel: It’s the end of Marketing as we know it. And we feel fine. from Ed Schipul on Vimeo.

Lessons learned about video: Given this was my first real attempt at video, I learned a few things. Like you can’t work with MOV files on a PC with Movie Maker. Macs have iMovie, which rocks. And iMovie compresses video into mv4 files which is cool with youtube. Limiters: Youtube limits video length to 10 minutes. Facebook limits video length to 20 minutes. Google video allowed longer videos but they are shutting it down. The ONLY product that worked was Vimeo for a 32:56 video. In short, vimeo ROCKS!

A direct link to “It’s the end of marketing as we know it. And we feel fine“