I’m guest lecturing at the School of Visual Arts in New York City in the Evolution of Marketing Class, a seminar for the school’s top graphic design students that is being taught by film and television director Bob Giraldi. Bob is probably best known for making the Michael Jackson “Beat It” Video.  Bob asked me to share my thoughts on where social media is going, how it’s disrupting advertising, and what it means for designers entering the job market.

Before we started the class, each person talked about their own social media preferences and habits.  The most interesting commonality was that none of the students read or really seemed to care about the NY Times.

Bob also asked me to give the students an assignment.  So back at SnapDragon, we put together two assignment briefs for the students: one is for a new client, Marblehead Greens. This company is the maker of gorgeous green khaki boating pants that are being positioned as an alternative to the uber preppy Nantucket Reds. The other brief was for a somewhat controversial political organization that we are in talks about doing a social media project with. We set budgets for each assignment and asked the students to come up with both strategies and designs.

I’ll share more about what the students put together—and hopefully will be posting some of their work on the blog.

We are  thrilled to announce that Robert Gonsalves has joined SnapDragon to run our West Coast operation and oversee the firm’s branded video development and production work. Robert is well known in the entertainment industry for having pioneered some of the earliest and most innovative social media and digital implementations at organizations like Disney, Warner Brothers and CNN.

Robert and his wife, Stacey Attanasio, are old friends of mine—years ago, Robert was the first person to really explain just how the worlds of media, entertainment and advertising were going to change—and it turned out that he was absolutely right. I’m very grateful to Robert for these early and generous insights and excited to now actually have the opportunity to formally collaborate with him. So in many ways, making this announcement feels less like someone new is coming on board and more like an evolution of discussion with an valued friend.

Over the summer, SnapDragon managed the social media for the introduction of 511 New York, the new telephone and Web service providing real-time traffic, transit, and weather condition information.

Part of that project involved automatically posting traffic and transit event updates from the 511NY site on 21 different Twitter feeds (12 regional ones and 9 for New York City’s subway lines). This initiative got a quite a positive response, even earning coverage in multiple newspapers (in print!).

Last week we improved this deployment further by incorporating shortened URLs that point directly to the page on the 511NY site from which each update came. By leveraging the very useful Bit.ly URL shortening service for this, we’re also able to track click-throughs and get an even better perspective on how people are taking advantage of this information source.

This adds to existing automated features such as sorting updates into categories using keywords to determine which feed information should be posted to, checking new event postings against a log of updates to prevent sending out repeats, and abbreviating commonly used words to fit more information in under Twitter’s 140 character limit.

For more information about this project along with some of our thinking about the direction social media is headed in terms of travel information, take a look at the presentation we gave last month at the 511 ITS conference.

When Dr. Freund speaks, Hollywood and Fifth Avenue listen.  Soon his audience will be expanding.  Now anyone who is wondering about whether or not to get a nose job or facelift can get top flight advice at our new project, PostYourFace.com.

This is a place where individuals can post their photos and celebrity plastic surgeon Robert Freund weighs in on whether the contributor should get plastic surgery or not. Visitors can share their opinion too by voting on whether each person should “go for it” or not.

The PostYourFace site site is still being tweaked, but we are eager for feedback and participation. We also want to thank the SnapDragon friends who so generously and bravely sent in their photos for the beta.

Let us know your thoughts. Sometime in the next few weeks, the site is going to be featured as part of a promotion with AOL’s StyleList blog.

Daniel Luxemburg, our head of social technology and expert on all things transportation-related, spoke at the 511/ITS Regional Workshop, an event for New York State DOT managers, private industry and others interested in trends in information delivery with regards to the transportation industry.

His presentation looked at the work SnapDragon has been doing with New York State, particularly the deployment of 12 automated Twitter Feeds that provide regional traffic updates and 9 automated Twitter alerts by subway line.

The I-95 Corridor Coalition (the regional organization behind the event) has posted all of the presentations given on their site. Here are the slides from ours:

Facebook has been evolving from a network of personal profiles to a stream of real time interactions for a while now. The original news feed will be three years old this September; Facebook itself will be about five and a half. So it’s recently become the case that Facebook has spent most of its life growing up to be something at least as much like Twitter (new and exciting) as MySpace (old world, but for a long time what Facebook was most frequently compared to).

The most high profile event in the flurry of recent Facebook-goes-realtime activity was its purchase of the online social activity aggregator FriendFeed last week. Predictably, the social media chattering class reacted with a whole lot of discussion and speculation. How will this change Facebook? What will happen to FriendFeed’s users? What sort of broader trends does this represent? What does it mean for the social Web as a whole? And from MediaPost’s Social Media Insider, Did Twitter Just Get Thrown Under a Bus?

Read More »

A few weeks ago I wrote about some indications that Google is looking to push its cloud computing services into new markets. Specifically, that they removed the “beta” label from Gmail and the other elements of the Google Apps suite and announced a Google-ready, stripped down operating system (the Chrome OS) that would serve as a perfect light-weight way to access those services.

Read More »

SnapDragon friend and colleague, Joe Dolce is one of the forces behind the movement to launch Dot Gay (.gay). It’s a new top level domain like .com or .edu but way more fabulous.   What this means is that in the future there will be sites on the Web like www.travel.gay or www.banking.gay.

Joe and his team at the Dot Gay Alliance are petitioning ICANN, the organization that issues domains for the right to administer and run Dot Gay. Joe’s plan is to use the sales of the Dot Gay domains to raise money for GLBT civil rights causes.

Joe shared with us this powerful note that explains how Dot Gay is going to work and why supporting it can make a difference:

The LGBT movement in America began when a few dozen drag queens protested a police raid at the Stonewall Tavern in NYC. Limp wrists turned to clenched fists and the riots lasted for a week. Through the AIDS epidemic and now in the fight for marriage equality, the movement has, with the help of a few key allies, supported itself on its own.

In the digital age, there is a new way to ensure the growth, visibility and strength of our movement. It’s called .GAY.

For the last 8 years ICANN, the group that runs the Internet, has been working on creating hundreds of new Top-level Domains (TLDs) beyond the familiar ones like .COM, .EDU, or .ORG. Some will be for specific businesses and others will be for various “communities,” like .TRAVEL, .ECO, and .GAY.

The organization I have formed, the Dot Gay Alliance, will be petitioning ICANN to run and operate the .GAY Top-level Domain. The implications for the LGBT community are vast – imagine a place where LGBT people, organizations and businesses can all gather. But here’s the part that excites me most: our business model includes a giveback scheme in which the majority of profits will go to the LGBT community. This will be extremely valuable and will continue our community’s tradition of sustaining itself.

Here are the benefits of the Dot Gay Alliance’s initiative to launch .GAY

1. Fifty-one percent of our profits, by charter, will go to LGBT civil rights organizations in the US and around the world. This is what makes us a true “community” domain. As I witnessed at the recent International LGBT Human Rights Conference in Copenhagen, Denmark, there are so many groups from so many countries doing important work that would benefit from financial support.

2. Dot Gay Alliance is gay-led, by me, and backed by Minds + Machines, an experienced group of registrars who will run the back end operation. They are the same group that got Al Gore to head the .ECO TLD initiative that is currently making news. (.ECO has the exact same financial giveback model. In its case all 51% of profits will benefit the Alliance For Climate Protection, Sierra Club and other action-oriented organizations). Our team brings conviction, technical expertise and the vision necessary to make .GAY a success.

3. I am convinced that the social entrepreneur model is an excellent way of raising money. This model will generate significant revenues, serve the market, and create financial muscle, which, as you know, is critical to pushing the levers of power.

4. For me this is personal. As a gay man who has watched at least two dozen friends succumb to HIV/AIDS and who has had his marriage in New York State deemed illegal, I live every day with institutional discrimination (as do you) and the cold fact of having less than my fair share of civil rights.  I am now old enough that I can honestly say that I want to give back.

In order for the Dot Gay Alliance to succeed we need endorsement from community members and organizations. The endorsements commit you to nothing, but signal to ICANN that you believe the idea is valid and that it will serve the community. (I’ve attached a sample letter so you can see the wording).

I strongly believe that the Dot Gay model, people, brains, and goals are the most effective way of building this into a powerful, inclusive community on the Internet and in the real world.

Will you please become an ally and endorse us? Together we can serve the community and create wonderful opportunities.

Joe Dolce can be reached at:

Joe Dolce
917 365 0950
jd@dotgayalliance.com
Skype: jadolce
Twitter: dotgayalliance

Great article in The Times on Monday: 10 Years Ago, an Omen No One Saw

Writer David Carr reflects on the “fabulous” party for the launch of Talk Magazine held next to the Statue of Liberty in 1999. In retrospect, Carr says it was a fin de siecle party where no one saw the “sharks circling in the Harbor.”

We’re delighted to report that the 21 Twitter feeds we developed for 511 NY are getting some great press.

This morning The New York Observer did a story focusing on the subway line feeds.

The Village Voice weighed in as well.