The Soccer Project
Four filmmakers, three of them former top level college soccer players, set off on a journey to connect with the world through pickup soccer. Read more
Need Permission for Social Media Monitoring?
Depending on how traditional your organization is and their reluctance to adopt social media practices, it can’t be worse than this video. Here’s an extreme example from the pharmaceutical industry where the legal adviser cannot even authorize listening in the social media space. Show it to your boss next time they tell you that you can’t do something.
Cereal Killer
Terry Border recently published a book called Bent Objects: The Secret Life of Everyday Things. It is three years of work and nearly 400 blog posts of attaching wires to food to personify them and illustrate a phrase or bad pun. Even Rhett and Link thought he was cool, as they interviewed him below.
Buick Tweetup in Greensboro
On Friday night I drove to Greensboro to attend a Tweetup sponsored by Buick. It was at a cool restaurant called Liberty Oak. We were upstairs on a loft overlooking the dining room. Some of their social media team and designers were in the area for the High Point Furniture Market. They are thinking about the design of the interior of their cars in new ways that relate to home design, and were looking for feedback and input from other designers. Since they were in the area, they also wanted to connect with Twitter users and other social media types.
I was the lone Triangle representative in attendance. I saw my friend Adam, who i met last year at Startup Weekend, and have seen many times as he joins us for social media events in the Triangle. I met several people that I knew from Twitter, but have never met in person, including Danielle and Tammy, who is a fan of North Carolina Wine TV. I also met Brandon, Jon and Sarah, among others.
The gathering was hosted by Lish (from Buick’s agency) and Robert (Buick’s social media manager). Robert was the one who showed me the 2010 Buick Lacrosse pictured above. That picture was taken with my dSLR, and the dashboard picture and these others were taken with my iphone. They say the camera you have with you is the best camera, but if I am carrying both cameras, my dSLR is better. I talked to both of them about social media and showed Robert some of the things that I can do with my iphone. He captured some video with his Flip of me explaining my posterous blog as seen on my iphone.
I also had the chance to speak with Alexandra, the woman responsible for the interior design of the car I sat in. She was interested in my perceptions of American cars and what can change those perceptions. We talked about one of the main differences between buying living room furniture and buying a car. A car is one thing and you are probably not going to go too far out in left field with your car choice. If you pick something trendy because you are trying to be cool, like the Nissan Cube, you will probably regret it in a couple of years. If you buy a standard living room furniture set, you can add a funky chair to the mix to accent your style. And in a couple of years, if it feels dated, you can just replace that one piece. It’s also like painting one wall of a room a funky color, rather than the whole room. A car doesn’t have that ability to upgrade, or change the style, if you tire of it. That’s why people make conservative choices. So car designers can only push the envelope so far.
One of the cool interior touches was recessed lighting throughout the interior. The technology included satellite radio, a backup camera with directional indicators based on how you turn the steering wheel, and an auxiliary jack to plug in your mp3 player along with a usb port to charge it, both located in the center console. There was also a light in the console so you could find these plugs.
It was a fun time and I made some new connections, new friends, and learned a little bit about a new car from Detroit and some of the thought behind it.
Lish and Robert at the Buick Tweetup at Liberty Oak in Greensboro NC
How to Make a Baby
Even though this video has a provocative title, it is a great example of animating still photos into a video. It’s also really sweet.
Here are some notes about how they made the video from www.otherthings.com. Follow the link for more information:
We made this video using a technique called “pixilation”, which is a fancy term for stop-motion animation done with real people instead of puppets. We shot it, frame by frame, with Raquel’s Canon DSLR over a period of nine months. Those of you who stopped by our house might have noticed some mysterious tape marks on the floor in the living room. Those were for the camera tripod and our feet.
Animating over such a long period of time, using an increasingly pregnant woman as one of your puppets, means basically throwing out everything you might normally do in an animated film. For example, early on, we had this idea that we should wear the same clothes every time, for continuity’s sake. But as Raquel’s pregnancy developed, we soon discovered that the extra effort required to change in and out of our uniforms was going to interfere with the goal of shooting as many frames as possible, and might even prevent us from finishing the project at all. We dialed down the perfectionism, and in the process ended up having a lot more fun with it.
Hat tip to Bit Rebels
My Media Exposure Continues: Interviewed about Foursquare Launch in Raleigh
Yesterday I was contacted by Tyler Dukes from News 14 Carolina, our local cable news channel, requesting an interview about the launch a Foursquare, a location-based social network. The program has rolled out in a number of larger cities, and just added Raleigh to its roster of nearly 40 cities. Here’s the text of the complete article below, and here’s the link to read it in context. And, yes, they did call me Jeffrey, but I told them to, and that’s a different story.
RALEIGH – Jeffrey Cohen was surprised to learn that the social media application Foursquare was launching in the Raleigh-Durham area Thursday.
Just two days earlier, Cohen had been selected as one of five beta testers for the application, which combines elements of social networking and friendly competition to help users explore their cities.
After downloading Foursquare on their smartphones, users can search for anything from restaurants to entertainment venues, then “check-in” when they visit using their built-in GPS. That information is passed along to the user’s friends, along with any reviews or recommendations they might have.
“It is essentially a location-based social network,” Cohen, a marketing and social media strategist based in Durham, said.
But in a phone interview Thursday, Foursquare founder Dennis Crowley said the lead time for the beta testers shouldn’t have been too shocking, given the size of his team.
“It’s four guys sitting around a table,” Crowley said with a laugh. “It’s less formal than you’d think.”
After starting with an initial list of places, Foursquare depends on users like Cohen to add to its local directory, essentially creating a crowdsourced database of — ideally — every business in the area.
“Once we have enough content, the users fill in the blanks,” Crowley said.
Users have already begun this process in 23 cities around the world, from Atlanta to Amsterdam. But Thursday, the start-up firm announced it was expanding the service to 15 additional places, with Raleigh-Durham among them. The service adds cities based on user feedback on its Web site.
Location-based social networks aren’t necessarily anything new. Services like BrightKite and Loopt allow users to share things like photos or places they’ve visited. The microblogging service Twitter recently announced it would add location services as well.
But for Cohen, the defining feature of Foursquare is the competitive element. Every time users check in with the service, whether at a bar or a city park, they receive points. Those points are compared to other users who visit the same place, creating a virtual hierarchy.
“It actually has a leaderboard,” Cohen said. “The more times you check in, the more time it accumulates.”
The user with the most points — or “mayor” in Foursquare parlance — is selected for each location every week. Users can even cash in their titles at participating businesses for freebies or discounts.
“Today I became mayor of Open-Eye Cafe of Carrboro,” Cohen said. “The leaderboard is one of the key things. It adds a competitive element to it.”
Crowley said points can also earn users specialized badges created by Foursquare programmers and often recommended by users.
For example, he said, “if you’ve been to too many karaoke bars, you get the Don’t Stop Believin’ badge.”
The element of competition and the chance for reward has so far kept users coming back.
“It’s really sticky,” Crowley said. “Once you start using it, you get addicted to it.”
And Cohen can attest to that.
“I feel like I need to drive around and go to places to check in to be on the leaderboard,” he said.
But Cohen points out that the service is mostly limited to smartphone users. Although users can access Foursquare on the Web, it has limited functionality compared to the mobile version. Crowley said that’s intentional.
“What we do is build things for phones to make cities easier to use,” Crowley said.
As with all location-aware programs, Cohen said a lot of people are hesitant to broadcast their whereabouts to a large audience. Often, he said, some of the same concerns come up.
“Do you really want people to know where you are every minute?” Cohen said. “If you check in at a coffee shop, people will know you’re not home.”
But he points out that users control what information they put out and who will see it.
Crowley said that control is important to users, and his small team has focused on this element since they first began Foursquare in 12 cities back in March.
“You don’t want everyone to know where you are all the time. You want some of your friends to know where you are some of the time,” Crowley said. “That’s what we’re trying to help you do.”
Shimmer Wall Photo Backdrop at Press Conference
Photo by Ginny Skalski
My friend Ginny recently started a new job as the Social Media Strategist for Cree, the RTP-based LED lighting company. In her second week on the job, she was involved in the planning of a major company press conference when they announced the addition of 575 jobs. The governor of NC was in attendance for the announcement.
Ginny wanted an interesting backdrop for the announcement, so she asked me if she could use my photo of the Raleigh Shimmer Wall. Cree was a major sponsor of this downtown public art installation, as it is lit at night with Cree LEDs (scroll down for a night view). I was happy to oblige. Ginny posted several pictures online listing me as the photographer, like the one above of Cree CEO, Chuck Swoboda. Below is my photo, which clearly shows the Cree sponsorship banner.
From the News & Observer Editors’ Blog: Here are 5 things you may or may not have known about the company:
1. Cree chips lit up the Beijing Olympics, with 750,000 red, blue and green LEDs made by Cree helping to light up the Bird’s Nest and Water Cube buildings.
2. The company donated the $1 million LED system backlighting the shimmer wall at the Raleigh Convention Center.
3. Cree was founded in 1987 by brothers Neal and Eric Hunter, N.C. State engineering grads.
4. The company went public in February 1993. We covered it with a paragraph in our Feb. 10, 1993, edition. Market value of the company was less than $100 million.
5. Friday afternoon, Cree’s market value, as measured by the value of its stock, was nearly $4 billion.
Quoted in News & Observer about Deep Fried Triangle Tweetup
Today’s Raleigh News & Observer features an article about the upcoming NC State Fair and the Deep Fried Triangle Tweetup that my business partners and I helped organize.
Even if you don’t play the plastic guitar or send text messages to your BFFs, you’ll be welcome at the first Deep Fried Triangle Tweetup, an event organized with OurHashtag, a Triangle-based social media group.
The group tries to host tweetups each quarter, said Jeffrey L. Cohen, a partner in OurHashtag. Tweetups allow people who know each other from Twitter, the microblogging site, to meet in person and share ideas about online communication.
“It’s a way to get together to put a face with a Twitter name,” Cohen said.
The first Triangle tweetup in 2007 attracted five people to a coffee shop. The group’s 2009 spring get-together attracted 250 people.
Attendees at the fair tweetup will be able to sample some of the fair’s deep-fried offerings, interact with fair entertainers and participate in a scavenger hunt using Twitter.
While most of these competitions are aimed at young people, [state fair spokesman Brian] Long hopes they don’t spend all their time in the gaming tent.
“If we can get young people in and still use the fair to educate them about the importance of agriculture, that’s a good thing.”
Your Tire’s All Flat and Junk
There’s a new Geico commercial with a talking pothole. It is completely ridiculous. It is not really offensive, but the pothole has the voice of a southern woman. The voice is somewhat stereotypical, and reminds me of what Designing Women would sound like if that show were made today.
Here’s a link if it doesn’t show above Watch on YouTube
Pondering Celluloids
The following clip shows the way not to get a girl’s number.