Category: Saturday

Saturday, March 14th at 05:00 PM
Presenters:
Henry Copeland – Blogads.com
Zadi Diaz – EPIC FU
Jeff Jarvis – What Would Google Do?
Michael Monello – Campfire
Sara Smith – Wonkette

1. Everybody’s doing it

• Twitter – Matt Bochak – “The Biggest Douche in social Media“*
• Free Copy of Viral Tweets Twitter Software (youtube)
• Metro Ford of Schenectady – press release about how they’re into social networking, when actually not
• Constellation Energy – linking policy “you must only link to their homepage – only text links – cannot link from porn sites”

2. Revenge of the Blogosphere

• Hasbro Mattel vs. Scrabulous – the product they replaced it with was/is horrible
• Skittles Twitter Campaign – homepage redirect to twitter/flickr/youtube, inappropriate comments posted. Site stolen from Modernista.
• KFC Fired Blogger – kfcnation, has a game to kill the chicken. Blogger fired for sexual issues then documented on KFC property.*
• “Joe the Plumber” Signs – make your own joe the plumber sign. “I am “so horny for” the “nude body of mccain” don’t tax me for working hard. Some of the sign suggestions were inappropriate.

3.  Revenge of the Blogosphere II

• Belkin – Mike Bayer at Belkin went to Amazon Turk and posted an offer to pay 65 cents to positively review Belkin products. “Perfect storm of sleaze and stupidity”*
• The Whopper Sacrifice in Facebook – ditch your facebook friends to get a free whopper. People got ditched for a hamburger.
• Motorola Krave on Gadget Blogs – paid people to go to gadget blogs and astroturf – but they are transparent about it.
• Rebuild the Party – Truck Nutz for all! Republican suggestion (digg-like) site for how to rebuild the party. There was no moderator for the suggestions.
• Knocked Out of Pizza Place – Pizza Hut sponsored video for people to order pizza
• delivered at another pizza place.

* Round Winners

Grand Prize Winner

• Belkin fake reviews

Questions:
Good social media marketing out there?
Boost Mobile
Digg and Kevin Rose
People who aren’t doing campaigns, but just using it well (@comcastcares)
My Starbucks Idea, suggestions and voting

How do you determine is something sucks?
People who pollute, or willfully act dumb or sleazy

“If people are talking about it, it works” is not always true.

You have to advertise because your product is bad – you should shoot for your product to be your ad, and your customers should advertise your product because they like it.

Ads are a necessary evil, in some cases social chatter works, for some it doesn’t.

Saturday, March 14th at 11:30 AM
Presenter: Lawrence Lessig – Stanford Law School

(Lessig is a great speaker, but hard to keep up with when taking notes. You can view his presentation and slides here: http://blip.tv/file/1889038)

Trust

lonely planet – reliable guide – don’t accept money/discounts for coverage. Money doesn’t make what they say false, just breeds mistrust.

Wikipedia does NOT accept ads. They leave much money on the table. They care how they look and have trust – money doesn’t make what they say false, just breeds mistrust

Mistrust

Ulterior motives – child vaccines – parents don’t trust health professionals. Drug paid to have negative reviews removed. This produces doubts by conceived conflicts. Many times doctors can get $$ from drug companies fueling mistrust. which hurts children.

“Classic Tobacco Science” – corrupted science. this weakens trust we have in science.

“Maxed Out” movie – credit card dept. Credit card dept cannot go away from bankruptcy. Hilary Clinton got it to go away at first – then flipped in 2001 when a senator (after getting money/donations from drug companies) $140,000. Will people trust her after they hear about the money? Even if she didn’t do anything.

Money is NOT evil. Money poisons trust because we begin to believe that decisions are potentially made for some other reason.

Politicians and Doctors say it’s crazy to think that these things change their thinking on an issue (or drug).

Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act – +20 years on copyright. Does this advance public good?

Easy public policy questions are answered wrong by our government.
Why?
Are they guided by something other than reason?

Dependencies erode trust. Founding fathers wanted INdependence. Congress has always had corruption issues. Bribery was ok until 1853.

It isn’t the same today. Now is “good souls corruption.”

Money buys results in Congress – nobody is stealing or cheating or bribing, but our faith is still destroyed in this institution. Money secures tenure – reelection. What they do isn’t guided by what it does to their constituents but rather how it hurts/helps the money they raise for reelection.

Congress is a farm league for K street. Business model of DC is work for 4-5 years then spin out to K street as a lobbyist.

The problem is not big government or deregulation – the problem is loss of trust. Last year only 9% thought congress has done or is doing a good job. Now only 18% think this. We can’t/won’t trust this institution.

How do we change this dependency? Restore trust and remove the improper dependencies. Make sure decisions are being made for the right reasons.

ONLY way to do this is to citizens funding of the nations elections. Congress can only get money from citizens directly (capped at 1-200/person). Or only from a central location.

Strike 4 Change (strike4change.org). Demonstrate how much candidates are losing from donations not coming in now. We have to change how congress is funded.

This is just the first problem, the dependency is the first problem. It may not be the most important problem, but his needs to be solved first. Something needs to be done to solve this problem – WE need to do something. We can afford to do something about this.

http://change-congress.org

Panel Podcast (mp3)

Saturday, March 14th at 10:00 AM
Presenter: Robert Hoekman Jr – Miskeeto LLC

• (actually more than 7 rules)
  You want your users to feel like a lion, and not feel frustrated.
• Unfortunately, the web sucks for making users feel like lions.
• Sites that work well support innate human behavior (you don’t buy a drill to drill, you buy a drill to make a hole).
• The number one goal for people using your site is to get away from your site.

1. Understand your users, and then ignore them.

• Who would buy a low carb version of a cheeseburger (they look the same, taste the same, smell the same, cost the same)? People said they would buy it, so they created and tried to sell the sandwich, but it did NOT sell. Why? People are bad at predicting their own behavior.
• Find out how users ACTUALLY act by observing and not going off of what they say they’ll do. Ignore what they say. If they tell you, they might be wrong.
• Example: basecamp.com – it focuses on the real human behaviors, and not just answers to questions.

2. Build only what’s absolutely necessary

• What does something absolutely need to do? Focus on those items
• Example: senduit.com (file upload/download service) there is no extra stuff in it.
• When people buy a cell phone, they don’t use many of the features on the phone that they’re paying for.
• It’s not about simplicity, it’s about clarity and usable/understandable.

3. Support user’s mental model – drag a fie to trash can to delete it.

People don’t think like computers – look at DOS delete model vs. the current delete model.

4. Turn beginners into intermediates immediately

• Don’t make users feel stupid – they will leave. Make things easier, and make them feel smart – they will stick around.
• Example: Old WordPress.com homepage was very difficult to sign up for an account. They got actual phone calls asking how to sign up. It took 10 minutes to add a larger more prominent sign up button. Conversions went up 12-14%. All the change did was help users feel smart

5, Prevent  Errors (and handle them gracefully)

• Policy emergency system harder to use – should be a BIG RED BUTTON. This makes it less likely someone will make a mistake.
• Make it easy to fix and change things to prevent errors.
• Example: Backpack.com – you can’t make errors – there are no error messages.
• Eliminate the possibility of errors – find errors and see if you can prevent them (or at least provide a helpful nice error message).

6. Design for uniformity consistency and meaning

• Squidoo.com – people would happen across the site from a search and not know where they were or why they’re there.
• Clean things up and make the experience more understandable.
• Improve the explainablity of the site so you know where you land and why/what you can do there.

7. Reduce Reduce Reduce (and refine)

• Store sign from "We Sell Fresh Here" to "Fresh Fish Sold" to "Fresh Fish" to "Fish" to No sign at all. It was obvious what was happening, and a sign wasn’t necessary. All clues for what happened in the store were obvious.
• Reduce the signal to noise ratio.