Since I'm in Paris on the 2nd of December to speak about social media & ROI at the Cyber-Elles conference, I'm going to make the most of it to attend the Viral Film Festival which is happening that evening.
Amongst the hundreds of viral videos that will be shown during the festival, here is one for French provider of summer and ski holiday accommodation,Pierre et Vacances that I particularly like: Yéti snowboarding at the Sacré Coeur in Paris - a video which is part of an overall campaign aimed at advertising the Yéti-Box, an all-inclusive ski package.
Anyone else going to the Festival du Film Viral in Paris?
NB: online PR for Yéti-Box: Repaway
Over the many years I've lived in London I've rarely wondered walked around Leicester Square, finding it far too 'touristy'... I was really therefore quite lucky last Saturday when I saw a sign in from of the Odeon Leicester Square mentioning that Josh Harris would be here for a Q&A session for the 6:30pm screening of We Live in Public.
If you have never heard of this documentary (I hadn't to be fair), check out the video below before I tell you a bit more about who Josh Harris is, about the Q&A session and about the movie in general:
First of all, it's interesting to note that Ondi Timoner, the film director, introduces Josh Harris as "the greatest Internet pioneer you've never heard of" whereas Josh Harris refers to himself as "an artist" and makes a point of stating that all of his "Internet experiences" over the last decade were done because of "art".
During this documentary, we discover how in 1993 Harris, then a dot.com millionnaire, founded Pseudo.com, a live audio and video webcasting site and to be honest, in the same way I'm always amazed the Cluetrain manifesto was writen 10 years ago, I'm also amazed at Harris' capacities of foreseeing what the Internet would be like a few decades later. Webstreaming in 1993, that was pretty adventurous!
Anyhow, Harris then went on to sell Pseudo to set up Quiet, an Orwellian project: he had 100 people living in a bunker in NY, and filmed them 24/24 hours in the aim to prove how, in "the not-so-distant future of life
online, we will willingly trade our privacy for the connection and
recognition we all deeply desire" (Wikipedia). Not satisfied enough with this first Orwellian project, he then put himself and his girlfriend under the limelight by living under live surveillance camera 24 hours a day for six months, still to prove the price we will all pay for living in public in the near future... What happened? He had a breakdown, left NY for the middle of nowhere in the US where he took over an apple farm and lived there for a few years...
That was in the nineties...
2009 is already refered to as the year of the real time web and although we don't yet all have a webcam filming and broadcasting our every move 24/24, we all willingly update our real time statuses on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and give days in days out a little bit more information about our private life, about our whereabouts... Is that to say that we're all heading to a mental breakdown?
That's the question I asked Josh Harris during the Q&A session.
His answer? "Loss of self". Over the next few years, people will start to behave in such a way that they will lose their individuality. They will behave to please the masses. Harris actually illustrates this with the example of when he and his girlfriend argued while they were living together and filmed by cctv: when his girlfriend asked him to go and sleep on the sofa the night of the argument, it wasn't her idea. It was her audience's idea; the idea they gave her while chatting online and reacting to their argument as if they were part of the couple's life.
According to Harris, people will all become increasingly similar. And thinking about it, this is already happening. Think about what you tweet. Think about the way you behave on Facebook and more generally on the way you present yourself in the wider social media web... Loss of self, loss of individualy, call it what you want - this is a very interesting point I'll try and take more time to develop here in the near future.
As a concluding note - if you haven't seen We Live in Public, make sure you do!
A week ago, blogger and entrepreneur Loic Le Meur was giving us "30 predictions for the future of Twitter" and if you haven't seen the video yet, one of the things he mentioned was how he foresaw that status updates will be present all accross social networks, be it Facebook, Yahoo, MySpace or LinkedIn. And how all status updates in the future will be updated everywhere at the same time...
Not sure whether Loic had used a cristal ball with regards to LinkedIn or whether he simply talked to them but turns out that LinkedIn today announced new features they will roll out in the next couple of weeks in partnership with Twitter. "When you set your status on LinkedIn you can now tweet it as well" and vice versa.
In addition to talking about how status updates will be rolled out to most social networks, here are a few things Loic predicts:
Twitter will be a good way to judget someone's reputation ie today you Google people, tomorrow you'll check them out on Twitter
Twitter will replace text messaging because it's portable and it's available all over the world
Private updates will become bigger than public updates
I'll let you watch his video below for more of his predictions but I wanted to touch on one of them more particularly: Loic insists on how companies will use Twitter in the future and how they will need to devote entire teams to Twitter.
On that subject, I was recently reading a post by David Armano about BlogWorld 09 and one of the things he mentions is how Scott Monty, when asked if he had made any mistakes in his role as Head of Social Media at Ford, "more or less responded that not
scaling soon enough was one of them". Interestingly enough, Peter Kim just wrote a post on that subject to: "Using Twitter at scale" and mentions CoTweet, a multiple account Twitter platform we've been using for various clients at We Are Social.
As a corporation, you can [and you should] use Twitter to engage with individuals online about your brands and products and clearly you can do it for a while on your own (like Scott Monty did for Ford) but soon enough you'll need to put a proper strategy into place and along side this, proper processes. In the same way your customer services department has formal processes...
As some of you know, I'm in a "transition phase" (I'll come back to that one another day) - I've moved out of my flat in Shoreditch and I'm currently staying with my friend Matthieu (@juninho69) and his flatmate Andy. Yep, two guys, so clearly I had to watch the Olympique Lyonnais v. Liverpool football match last night ;D
Interestingly enough, I used this opportunity to test out the Football3s real-time app developed by Mint Digital that our friend @utku presented to us a few weeks ago.
These days, it's all about the "real time web" as I've already mentioned in a previous post... I mean, come on, even Google and Bing have integrated Twitter updates in their search algorythm. But the real-time web is not just about status update and I love what the guys at Mint Digital have done with their live fantasy football game!
As a real game is starting on your tv, you log in to Football 3s, pick up 3 players from either team and as the match is being played, you get points whenever your players' do something on the real pitch. Check it out, very entertaining, especially as you can play against other friends online.
Below screenshots are showing printscreen of my team Finsbury Parc FC....
And as you can see... only 1 point after 9 min 25 secs... But it was fun!
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I work at We Are Social, a social media agency - however, this is my personal blog and the views expressed here may not reflect those of my employer...
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