Puma has released I-Cycle, a series of video shorts featuring the founder of the Recycle-A-Bicycle program in New York, actor Matthew Modine’s Bicycle For a Day, the guy who had the first pedicab in New York, the organizer of the Bicycle Film Festival, and Puma’s bike collecting CMO.

One thing that jumped out at me immediately was that the interviews were done on the bike, not in the studio. Being able to see the person talking instead of just hearing a voiceover during a riding shot makes it feel so much more personal. Also, Puma branding is almost non-existent. I noticed a shot of the Bike Film Festival guy wearing Pumas and there are obviously some kicks in the video with their CMO. But Puma has smartly told interesting stories about bike culture, not about their products

via PSFK

The BBC has published a guide for its producers on how to use social networks and other social sites to promote the BBC and its programming. The principles that they outline are essential for any marketer who wants to use social web sites in a way that feels natural and appropriate to users. Here are their spot-on recommendations about Tone of Voice:

We should be sensitive to the expectations of existing users of the specific site. If we add a BBC presence, we are joining their site rather than the opposite. Users are likely to feel that they already have a significant stake in it. When adding an informal BBC presence, we should “go with the grain” and be sensitive to user customs and conventions to avoid giving the impression that the BBC is imposing itself on them and their space.

For example, we should respect the fact that users on site X are not our users; they are not bound by the same Terms of Use and House Rules as we apply on bbc.co.uk. Attempts to enforce our standard community rules on third party sites may lead to resentment, criticism and in some cases outright hostility to the BBC’s presence.

This is not to say that behaviour likely to cause extreme offence, for example racist insults, should be tolerated by the BBC on a BBC branded space on a social networking site. It should not. Neither should behaviour which is clearly likely to put a child or teenager at substantial risk of significant harm. But where we do decide to intervene, we will normally need to do so with a light touch, sensitive to different expectations and a different context from bbc.co.uk

via NewTeeVee

TechCrunch reports that garbage and recycling company Waste Management has launched a social network called Greenopolis that encourages users to “Learn. Act. Reward. Together.™” It’s a full-on social network with user profiles, friends lists, blogging and media, forums, etc. It’s also an example of a company hopping on the social networking bandwagon a bit too eagerly, even if a $20 billion dollar company like Waste Management can afford to throw some promotional weight behind Greenopolis.

Still, the site is unlikely to have nearly the impact of the (Lil) Green Patch Facebook application. As a user, all you need to do is add the application, plant something in your friends’ patches, and get back to doing whatever else you do on Facebook. There’s no new profile to create, new blog to write, new media to upload, new forums to use, etc. With 5.5 million profiles and over 615,261 daily users, the (Lil) Green Patch reaches a lot more people than it looks like Greenopolis ever will.

For whatever reason, green social networking hasn’t taken off, at least not in proportion to the size of the population that cares about environmental issues. The sites are out there but they haven’t really gained traction with users. Maybe the problem is that we’re already doing as much social networking as we can handle in a 24 hour day, so a niche social network is a tough sell to new users unless there’s already a thriving community in place. Like Dogster.

In any case, brands - whether green or not - are probably better off taking a cue from (Lil) Green Patch and tapping into existing social networks rather than starting their own. If Waste Management had done that, maybe they’d have more money for their U-23 cycling team.

Robert Scoble had a guest column on TechCrunch yesterday arguing that Kyte beat out its competitors in the market for live video streaming from your mobile phone. We’ve already selected Kyte as the video platform for the project that I’m working on for SRAM, so we must be really smart.

Brandweek has a story about how Levi’s has instructed its lead ad agency to change course in order to accomodate the success of this video:

“[Jumpin' In] was supposed to be a small seeding activity,” said Robert Cameron, vp-marketing at Levi Strauss, San Francisco. “We didn’t know it was going to blow up. So we’re meeting with [lead agency] BBH on how to chase this. What do we do to adjust the strategy and ride the wave?”

I think that’s the right way to look at it. You never know when this kind of video is going to blow up, and lots of campaigns misfired by assuming that theirs will. But you do get lucky, you need to move quickly in order to take advantage.

There was much hoopla surrounding the opening weekend of Lance Armstrong’s bike shop/coffee shop/training center in Austin. MASH got to be a part of it, which was huge.

There are loads of articles and blogs to link to, but here is the most important (at least over time): Yelp

Mashable! has a great interview with rapper Chamillionaire about how he marketed his song “Ridin Dirty” to sell 4,000,000 ringtones and win a Grammy. He basically spells out how to promote content through social media channels and talks about why the traditional metric of album sales no longer works to measure an artist’s popularity.

I’m not a huge fan of his work, but I’ve always respected the man. He spent years selling mixtapes directly to a street-level fanbase and keeping about $10 from every CD sold, while turning down record deals that would have paid him a buck or two per sale. Here’s a clip of the interview:

…and here’s the Floyd Landis parody version:

Tuesday’s episode of Bob Costas’ “Costas Now” show on HBO featured a round-table discussion with Costas, old-school sportwriter Buzz Bissinger, NFL player Braylon Edwards, and Will Leitch, founder of Deadspin, a major sports blog. Bissinger pretty much went crazy and attacked blogs as sandboxes for crass, uninformed idiots - which they often are. You can watch the segment here. He starts ranting at about the 14:05 mark.

The underlying premise was that blogs are killing the craft of traditional sports journalism, which of course scares traditional sports journalists like Bissinger and Costas. That premise is correct to a large extent, but it misses another major factor: that the athletes themselves will play a role in the demise of the sportswriter by using those same tools to bypass the traditional gatekeepers of the information and talk directly to fans.

Here’s an example:

Earlier this year, there was a big to-do about how the Red Sox players were threatening to boycott their Opening Day games in Japan unless the team’s clubhouse staff received the same $40,000 bonus promised to the players. Every sports media outlet covered the story, but no reporter could possibly explain the players’ perspective as well as Red Sox pitcher Curt Schilling did in this blog entry.

If they write like that, athletes will do more than pictures of Matt Leinart partying to make sportswriters obsolete .

Starting right away, I’ll be working with SRAM Corporation’s marketing team on web strategy and content with an emphasis on social media. I worked closely with them in 2006 when Kodak Gallery/Sierra Nevada was one of the first two teams in the world to ride their road components, and I’m really excited about this project. We have lots of great things in the works.

More info to come…

Within the last couple weeks, Future Communications made their first round of changes to Cyclingnews.com since they acquired the site last July.

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