Social Media prediction 2009....

A comment I made on Greg Verdino’s blog.

I Twitter’d the following earlier this week…

“As we evolve w SM the need for mass popularity diminishes& quality/quantity & connexions for purpose become need of user”

And so, I completely agree with your vision for 2009. Not only that, but I agree that professionals using SM as a tool to market and brand will find true value in tight knit community influencers rather than these ‘geography-less super followed’ that we all strive to be today.

If I can be selfish enough to predict the future of SM in 2009 I would say…

Physical communities will become a growing factor in how we effectively use social media. The global community will continue to inspire and participate but how we use technology to enhance the neighbourhoods we shake hands with and directly involve ourselves within will be the next evolution of the medium.

When I was just a little boy, I asked my country what should I be?

I wrote the following in July of 2005, and as I looked back at the blog of my early twenties, this is the ONE and ONLY post I will ever want salvaged. In this new era of ‘change’ I can’t help but believe that we are in fact moving into a new time, a new system of messages to be consumed on mass; this is both refreshing and inspirational.

From July 2005,

Oh the looks on the faces of pundits and right facing paupers when the future reveals that the greatest epoch of fascism and ill fated guidance had twenty-four seven coverage all along,and over half a nation (by 2 percent) bought into the confusion and concoction of a brothers grim fairy tale of primetime fear.

They’ll talk of a Big Brother who put us to bed every night rubbing our heads and re-assuring our minds that the bad men are out there but to not worry; because we will get them. All along going out while we slept to pillage the ‘others’, cutting and pasting the appropriate images to create the next chapter of the tale.

I hope the environment doesn’t fuck us before we can see the look on a republican post-america, when a tourist from China comes over to take pictures of the ideology factories of Viacom, NewsCorp, AOL and TimeWarner, mere shadows of the power structures they once were: Eyes will well with tears just as now when one visits Auschwitz.

Puff Puff Pass

You have to think that the community of Bad Oldeslo in Northern Germany is going to let out a collective, Oh Scheiße, this morning when they pick up their copy of the local Stormarner Tageblatt . As a guy with family in the Durham region, and who has seen Roger and Me so many times that I cant get that visual of the lady clubbing the bunny out of my head, I think it is important that in this age of economic uncertainty that anyone who manages to read my writing know that times may be tough, but fret not, as you are not alone.

You see Bad Oldeslo is home to GlaxoSmithKline Deutchland who manufactures Volmax. Volmax is one of the four ingredients that make up long-acting beta2 agonists, the most common form of Asthma treatment that most of us would call a puffer or inhaler. With the Canadian Medical Association Journal’s release that up to 30% of Canadians living with asthma have been misdiagnosed, I can’t help but visualize the German GSK acting out like a Stride Gum commercial this morning.

Report author Shawn Aaron and the crew that put this report together, have possibly uncovered one of the greatest medical oversight’s in modern medicine. In simpleton terms, this means that in a room of ten asthma sufferers, THREE OF THEM  SHOULD NOT EVEN BE IN THE ROOM. This is either, an incredible black mark on public health care that highlights what happens when you overwork an industry to a point where detail regarding the healthy lifestyles of our communities is passed over for productivity and benchmarking, or this is the perfect plot line for the next James Bond film!

I started looking at this story through cbcnews.ca, and I think this quote got me rilled up the most.

Physicians are under a lot of pressure to manage a lot of patients quickly,” Aaron said. “For a patient who comes in complaining of shortness of breath and wheeze, it’s much more easy and it takes much less time to say, ‘I think you have asthma, take this puffer.

What’s worse is I don’t know who the fault ultimately falls on for this collective gaffe. Do we blame the overworked and underfunded health care system that needs to implement quantity over quality processes to meet demand? Or maybe there is some real world Ernst Stavro Blofeld character running around plotting human demise with the use of inhalers and Ritalin (don’t get me started on ADHD). Or is it possible that we ultimately need to point the finger at the concept of public health care at its root?

For any readers from Bad Oldesloe, take a deep breath I am sure you will all be fine.

dodge those costs, ram that content.

The most evolutionary mash up of new marketing strategy of this year could easily be the new 2009 Dodge Ram Challenge.

The ultimate ‘pro’ for digital marketing is the lack of airtime costs that brands do not need to spend as with traditional media such as TV, Radio and Print. However the ultimate ‘con’ for digital is that no current online channel can offer the same volume of targetted audience as the traditional 30 second spot with as little leg work.

Dodge and its creative team on the Dodge Ram Challenge, have made what I find to be the ultimate mashup of new and traditional media.

Dodge decided to film an 8 episode reality show, and spot advertise on male focused television traditions on Spike TV and Monday Night Football. The ads directed people online to webepisodes of  a wildly ‘man’centric super challenge using beefy pickup trucks and some of our sexe’s most profiled ‘life’ characters. They got director Tony Scott to create the series and decided to only stream the show online in webisodes.

Deciding to put the entire concept online and voiding producing a full feature television series is cost cutting mastery. Its like choosing a granoloa bar instead of bacon and eggs for breakfast. Sure bacon and eggs sounds good, tastes good, reminds you of good ole times with the family around the table. But the granola bar option, lets you eat on the fly, get more done, keeping you light yet energized with enough money in your pocket for lunch later that day.

This concept is a starting point to something much bigger. As online entertainment continues to grow as a medium of choice to view popular culture, will television soon be reduced to syndicated re-runs and advertisements? Online channels continue to develop strategy on how to cost effectively deliver their programming online, and as I continue to watch more programming off web portals I really wonder as to how far away are we to simply migrating the computer into the living room space formerly occupied by the television.

'It was like cop land, without the hijinx of Sylvestre Stallone'

A group of us went to see Alliance Films new power-cast cop flick Pride & Glory last night, and so I thought a review was in order.

The film was pretty good’ish, and out of our group of 5 who saw the film, Pride & Glory would get 3 out of 5 stars. Every film should be screened and rated how I viewed the film last night. Take a typical Canadian group of peers, made up of a mix of sex, ethnicity, profession, age, and have them watch a movie. When you leave each of the five gets to say ‘star’ or ‘no star’.

If you like cop drama series’ like The Wire, Brotherhood, Homicide, then you will enjoy Pride & Glory. The cast is made up of Ed Norton circa American History X post jail, Colin Farrell circa Tigerland, the best friend from the Truman Show, and Jon Voight as the Irish cop dad who acts one of the best drunken grandpa at the Christmas dinner table scenes that I could even fathom.

You have to value any film that creates debate after you leave, and the topic of interest around this film was the lack of strong female roles; as in there were none. What was most interesting however, is how each of the respective supporting females who complimented each male character was paramount to the character development and the outcome of the plot of the featured characters.

Watch the film for this reason alone, as Joe Carnahan and Gavin O’Connor do a very good job of creating characters whose professional actions are reflective of the happenings in their personal lives; an aspect of plot which is often lost in most cop dramas.

So, I say watch the film, deal with the aggrevating handheld camera shots in the first 20 minutes and settle in for a little dirty Irish cop & latino drug dealer fix.

OH, and very important, watch the film with someone who speaks Spanish, it will add depth to the film that us traditional bilingual Canadians could not otherwise pick out.