A lite approach to virtual worlds

Posted on May 1, 2009 by justingibbs

Comcast of all companies has an interesting ad campaign using virtual worlds – Comcast Town. The campaign combines a funny jingle, commercial spots, and an easy to use virtual world or more specifically a virtual room builder. It’s Flash based so there is no need for an install and that isn’t the only thing Comcast got right. What they’re really playing on is the fact that most people find virtual world technology nifty. They may not stick around and make the virtual world part of their daily lives but many will spend a few minutes decorating a virtual room. What advertiser wouldn’t like that type of engagement with their products and brand? It’s quick and has more context than technology. As I continue to harp on – virtual worlds are about the context. Comcast Town is a lite example of context leveraging the technology.

But like I said, they do a lot of things right.

It’s got style – from the art to the odd incorporation of squirrels
Reinforces Comcast’s products – phone, TV, Internet
Incorporates other trendy brands – Boing Boing and Notcot
Makes a great use of sound
Doesn’t require an instillation
Has context – pulls much from the commercials and grounds you in building a room
Has a goal – it’s a contest (however weak that is it certainly adds to the context)
Game elements – you only have so much money

Is it viral? I doubt it. It incorporates with Facebook so there is that but it’s not like you’re building an army of vampires. But I think that lends to it’s feeling of being lite.

Overall its a great use of virtual world technology and an example other virtual worlds could learn from – namely context. It’s lite and engaging, what brand wouldn’t want that?

Twitter is a great example of character development

Posted on April 16, 2009 by justingibbs

As Twitter goes mainstream I hear more questions about what makes Twitter so special? Many are from people outside the tech industry – they simply don’t get Twitter. Is it all the celebrities who got on? Is it the tech geeks? Like any successful product it’s a combination of things, but one ingredient that is often overlooked is it’s character development. Such strong character that the infamous fail whale is the equivalent of famous movie lines people quote.

Twitter’s character is more than the great art. Twitter uses every opportunity to express itself and with a touch of humor. How can you not like the “Who goes there?” screen?

Twitter did a lot of things right but beyond the more obvious they utilize classic character development techniques from screenwriting. I doubt they were thinking about screenwriting at the time but their minimalist design has unforeseen benefits.

Character is revealed through choices made under pressure

As the screenwriting guru Robert McKee explains, true character is expressed in the choices they make under pressure.

TRUE CHARACTER is revealed in the choices a human being makes under pressure – the greater the pressure, the deeper the revelation, the truer the choice to the character’s essential nature.

When Twitter is under pressure, say when the service is down, it chooses to add a little humor and a art. Where other services use the opportunity to be informative Twitter uses the majority of the error screen to express character, to have some fun.

Action moves story

Dialog doesn’t move screenplays, action does. Most of the time the action taking place on Twitter is from other users, however when there is action they use the opportunity to reveal character The service being down would certainly count as action, so would finding a user who has been removed.

Where other services rely on their ads or about pages to build character, Twitter speaks most often through their actions. Compare Twitter to Ask.com’s old mascot Jeeves. He was around for years and we never really knew him. They built ads around Jeeves and plastered him all over the site yet none of it from action.

Characters are simple

Twitter also follows another cardinal rule of screenwriting, keep it simple. We all have our favorite movie characters and think of them as being rich and complex, but in reality movies need to deliver simple characters so we can know them.

A character is a work of art, a metaphor for human nature. We relate to characters as if they were real, but they’re superior to reality. Their aspects are designed to be clear and knowable; whereas our fellow humans are difficult to understand, if not enigmatic. We know characters better than we know our friends because a character is eternal and unchanging, while people shift – just when we thing we understand them, we don’t. In fact, I know Rick Blaine in CASABLANCA better then I know myself. Rick is always Rick. I’m a bit iffy.

- Robert McKee

Twitter doesn’t do much PR or ads to confuse us. Like the service itself, Twitter’s character is simple and I can easily plug it into my head just as I do great movie characters.

Other examples of great character

Can you think of other services that exemplify character development? Or maybe some things Twitter is doing that is detrimental to the character development?

Not only do you need a story, but a storyline

Posted on April 14, 2009 by justingibbs

I saw the new Seth Rogen movie Observe and Report last week at a sneak preview and thought it was a great example of applying the trappings of story but never actually delivering a story. The same can be said for many companies today.

Some are applauding Observe and Report for taking risks while others are condemning it for picturing date rape. Seth Rogen explained the date rape scene.

When we’re having sex and she’s unconscious like you can literally feel the audience thinking, like, how the fuck are they going to make this okay? Like, what can possibly be said or done that I’m not going to walk out of the movie theater in the next thirty seconds? . . . And then she says, like, the one thing that makes it all okay: “Why are you stopping, motherfucker?”

The line let me laugh, but it didn’t completely free me to laugh out loud. The line makes it okay to laugh but not a 100%. It is a black comedy after all, you have to expect this kind of stuff. That interplay however is a great way to sums up the movie – horrendously black comedy matched to character development and tricks to let you feel okay enough to laugh. What the film makers forgot in all of this was the storyline and as any screenwriter knows, without a storyline the audience can’t get fully engaged. They do some character development which was nice but the storyline is just a collection of jumbled cliches – the loser going after the popular girl, the quiet girl secretly pining away for the loser, etc. The black comedy bits start popping up and we’re along for the ride, but never committed. Seeing it as a sneak preview the film actually cut out half way through and the lights came on. I and another friend debated walking out as it was unknown how long it would take them to get the movie back on. We could have walked out and never thought twice about how the story ended, because there was no story. Fortunately the film started seconds later.

All black comedies use tricks and character to let me laugh but great black comedies like Dr. Strangelove involve storyline as well. Compare the two films and see if you could walk away from either, if you can laugh fully, if you’re engaged.

Missing storylines aren’t only a concern for movies. As Seth Godin said, marketing is about telling a story. But today many companies are just using the trappings of story in their marketing and PR. They never flush out the whole story because many of them don’t have a complete story. I bet if you ask the creators of Observe and Report what their inspiration was, they might mention wanting to put some of the darker moments on film. What I doubt you would hear is anything about showing a character overcome their position in life.

How many times have you been caught watching a horrible movie but can’t step away? Even as friends plead with you to turn it off and go with them to dinner. Minutes earlier you admitted that it was a horrible movie, but somehow you can’t step away without seeing how it turns out. That’s storyline. Adding the trappings of story to a product or company will help a little, but you need a full storyline to get people fully engaged. The trappings can make date rape funny but without the storyline the movie is destined to fade away without much of a trace – not unlike some companies.

What do social media and movie characters have in common?

Posted on March 27, 2009 by justingibbs

Social media is likened to a conversation so if you’re a social media strategist your job is basically to converse with customers because the “company” itself can’t. You can go about it a few different ways.

Conduct the conversation as yourself on behalf of the company
Take on the persona of the company
Create a fictitious company representative

Whatever strategy you take, Paul Worthington suggests that companies create a company guide for social media.

The new reality of online customer conversation means brands will need a strongly defined sense of self in order to succeed.

Worthington goes on:

Before opening yourself up to the conversation, before engaging outside, start with who you really are, what you as an organization really believe in, and what gets you out of bed in the morning.

Forget mission and vision statements. These are banal at best. Forget ‘shareholder value’ — No one ever got out of bed for increased shareholder value (but if you have something powerful to drive you, you have a better chance of creating plenty of it).

All good advice and something that strikes me as being very similar to creating a character in a screenplay. Maybe the analogy can be a useful one.

It’s not just what you say

The one thing you’ll hear over and over in screenwriting is that dialog is the last thing you write.

Write dialogue last and remember that the real drama of a film is underneath what is being said and done.

- Creating characters and dialogue

So think about the actions more than the particular message. How quickly do you respond to messages on Twitter? Do you have a profile on MySpace and Fackebook or should you just have one on Facebook? Have a blog? You get the point.

True character is revealed through crisis

The screenwriting guru Robert McKee explains in his seminal work, Story, how true character is created.

TRUE CHARACTER is revealed in the choices a human being makes under pressure – the greater the pressure, the deeper the revelation, the truer the choice to the character’s essential nature.

- Story: Substance, Structure, Style and The Principles of Screenwriting

Seems about right, we hear about great uses of social media most when there is a crisis – like when Hulu pulled “It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia”. It’s similar to mountaineering, you hear more about the daring rescues than first accents.

A character is not a real human

Always remember to keep things simple – you’re not portraying a real person, even if you’re playing yourself.

A character is a work of art, a metaphor for human nature. We relate to characters as if they were real, but they’re superior to reality. Their aspects are designed to be clear and knowable; whereas our fellow humans are difficult to understand, if not enigmatic. We know characters better than we know our friends because a character is eternal and unchanging, while people shift – just when we thing we understand them, we don’t. In fact, I know Rick Blaine in CASABLANCA better then I know myself. Rick is always Rick. I’m a bit iffy.

- Story: Substance, Structure, Style and The Principles of Screenwriting

We want reality but we don’t want reality. You get the point.

We remember great characters

As humans we’re built to remember people – by sent, facial recognition, etc. So in theory the more you act like a character, the more likely you’ll be remembered and cut through the clutter.

Viral loops great, but not as great as positioning

Posted on March 26, 2009 by justingibbs

Update: Just noticed that Eric Ries posted about the show himself – check it out

Living in San Francisco it was easy to stop by the Facebook Developer Garage last night, put on by Kontagent. It was a great show and much more crowded than I expected. Of course they had a great lineup of speakers. I found Eric Ries presentation, with its emphasis on positioning rather interesting. Much of the material can also be found in an early post on his blog Lessons Learned.

He started his presentation by going over the levers of engagement.

Synthetic notifications – sent directly from the company
Organic notifications – sent from an action one of your friends did (automatically notify a person’s friends whenever they upload pictures)
Positioning – “the battle for your mind” as Eric puts it

Then he covered viral metrics and the basics of building viral loops. Viral loops have been all the rage the last few years, with articles like “The 10 steps to creating a viral loop.” But as Eric warns, some of this might be coming at the expense of positioning. With everyone following the 10 steps or whatever, all they’ve done is ensure that their product is the same as every other – the exact opposite of positioning. Some might say who cares, we can track virality and we’re growing by leaps and bounds. Granted it’s a little tougher to track peoples minds but if you’ve lost that battle, you’ve lost the war.

In his blog post Eric suggests that you focus more on your positioning as it is the most powerful of the levers (synthetic being the least powerful) and then use the viral loop to drive it home.

To win the positioning battle, you could try and make your product better than the competition, or find a different positioning that allows you to be the best at something else. Let’s assume for the sake of argument that your competitors offerings are “good enough” and that you cant’ figure out how to beat them at their own game. So you decide to try to reposition around a different value proposition, one that more closely matches what your product is best at. You could try and drive home that positioning with an expensive PR campaign, superbowl ads, and whatnot. But you don’t have to – you have a perfectly good viral loop that is slowly but surely exposing the entire world to your positioning messages.

Silicon Valley is about technology first, everything else second. Ask someone about their new start-up and they’ll most likely tell you about its technology. After we realize that great technology itself isn’t going to guarantee success we gravitate toward the latest marketing trends, but we shouldn’t forget the tried and true realities of marketing of which positioning is one. How did Avis compete with the biggest competitor in rental cars, purely with positioning – “We Try Harder”.