scott goodson's writings

NEW CLIMATE PLAN ADOPTED!

The U.S. is joining almost 200 nations in a pact that lays the initial groundwork for a new global treaty to combat climate change. But the agreement offers few specifics and doesn't require the countries to make binding emissions cuts.

The deal followed days of deadlocked and sometimes acrimonious talks at a United Nations climate change conference here, during which the U.S. came under attack for blocking progress.

The pact was nearly derailed by a tense standoff between the American delegation and leaders of dozens of developing nations, who want the U.S., the world's largest carbon emitter.

COOLEST PLACE ON EARTH

I'm in Brazil at the coolest place on earth. Bahia Brazil Txai. The place to be to find yourself after a most incredible marathon year at Frog. Art, air, sea and inspiration makes Scott a more interesting person. Brazil is hot. And Bahia is very cool. THE place that's off the beaten tourist path. It's not easy to get here, but once here, you know it was well worth the trip. How do you spell heaven?

THE COOLING OF RUSSIAN DESIGN, WEB AND ADVERTISING

Some very hot graphics and design are coming out of Russia and the Ukraine. Sitting here in StrawberryFrog New York, I am glued to the very cool studios along the Volga. Or should I say Nile...as in Nile Studio, a very hot shop in a very cold landscape, with a very funky website. Some of the most interesting rising stars can be found on a wonderful and inspiring blog entitled the design collector, with the web address http://designcollector.ru - my favs include

indeepop

nirt

plong

brnd

tarazaurus

Danil Kryvoruchko

CROWDWARE HAS ARRIVED

There’s been a lot of talk about user-generated content.

And now it’s about the rise of user generated products.

The new model actively welcomes and integrates an ongoing channeling of consumer input. Now it’s applications, called widgets.

The era of crowd sourcing software began with Crowdspirit and was taken to a new level by Facebook: now anyone can design a miniature widget for the Facebook platform.

The new marketing all-stars are intellectual, strategic, creative people who embrace the “new interactive consumer culture” and the ideas that embed their products within it. Because the ideas aren’t coming just from ad agencies and clients or tech firms, they’re coming from consumers!

We decided to leverage this trend, when Microsoft asked us to spark a national cultural movement for it’s small business software. We came up with the idea of issuing a call for user generated ideas. This sparked an avalanche. We’ve generated millions of downloads. And millions of Americans are engaged in some form with the search for the America’s best small business idea at Ideawins.com. Some of the remarkable user-generated business ideas, which have been submitted such as Do It Yourself Wallpaper design and the Endless Closet, a high, end Women’s Fashion Rental store.

But, consumers aren’t waiting to be invited in to come up with product ideas. They’re doing it on their own.

Check out CrowdSpirit. This is a site dedicated, as it says, to ‘Electronic Products Crowdsourcing’. It invites members to submit an idea for a new, innovative electronic product. Members then vote, define specs or invest money in products. Once finalized, the site then enables members to test and recommend products to retailers. Based on what you contributed to the project, you can then earn a share of the revenue generated by the CrowdSpirit community as a whole making great ideas happen.

This is the true interactive consumer culture that business and the new client model needs to embrace.

Because what it delivers is more involved, more meaningful relationships with audiences/consumers – and therefore more involved, more meaningful businesses.

And now Facebook has taken all of this to a new level. In November this year, it claimed to have almost 10,000 consumer-generated widgets on its site. One of the most popular are Zombie hug and Fun Wall. Fun Wall for example has 3.5 million users and was designed by Slide, a small tech firm on the west coast who has created the widget of choice for the moment. Another brand to watch is WidgetBox, the makers of my favorite PacMan Widget on Facebook. Facebook’s revolution capitalized on the growing trend of the online sharing of content, and spread of content within a user-base contained within a community. Altogether, Myspace, Facebook have global membership in the tens of Millions.

Slide’s founder Max Levchin predicts a huge future for widgets, which he characterized as little tiny TVs that live on webpages. “The widget.” he said, “is likely the most powerful media broadcasting system ever built.”

DELTA AIRLINES DISSAPPOINTS

UNFRIENDLY SKIES FOR THIS TRAVELLER

I'm a regular business traveler like the next guy. Recently I bought Delta's new ad campaign. Changed tickets from other airlines and decided to give them the benefit of the doubt.

On 3 separate First class flights in the last month, flights that flew for over 3 hours, I did not receive anything to eat, except for a tiny bag of nuts or pretzels.

Imagine that. Here we have Delta spending a fortune on advertising to tell me that things have changed, I believe them (why?) and then gave them my money. I Ddecided to travel in First Class on Delta, not in coach. To my surprise I did not receive anything nourishing to eat, not even a single slice of stale bread. There was plenty of chips and Coke all around though.

The purser on all three flights told me, after looking at me like I was crazy to ask for food, that Delta doesn't serve food because it's competitors don't. Funny, last week I flew on a competitive airlines on the same flight, this time in coach and received a full meal.

In my 'Hole Index' I give Delta top points for their advertising, but the First Class product falls well short of the icing - they get a 2 out of 10 (1 point for easy boarding, 1 point for a little wider seating).

No one should be duped by Delta into believing this is really First Class, because it simply is not. So why does Delta airlines even try?

My advice? After my experience, don't fly Delta First class. No food, no First Class service. And with seats offering a tiny bit of extra room, it's simply not worth the money. Oh, but the stewardess' uniforms are all spanking new. And so is Delta's new ad campaign. Both are very nice.

Here are some additional critical blogs of Delta's service:

One critic of Delta

Another critic of Delta

Another critic of Delta Airlines

Here's a critic who is a journalist from the New York Times.

BLACK MARKET TICKETS FOR BEIJING OLYMPICS ON THE NET

The BBC reports that black market tickets for next year's Olympic Games in China are already being sold illegally on the internet.

Individuals who were initially allowed to buy 50 tickets each are cashing in by selling them for more than 10 times their face value.

More here.

I went online and found dozens and dozens of sites both official and unofficial-looking which claim to sell tickets such as Ticket Jones Olympic Tickets Beijing 2008. It's totally confusing.

Where can I find the official site to buy real tickets that I can truly get into the events with?

HOW TO BECOME A VERY SUCCESSFUL BRAND MANAGER

Here's the place to start.Find out everything you need to know to become a very successful brand or marketing manager. Click here.

10 BEST OF 2007

As voted by the STRAWBERRYFROG staffers.

1. The best magazine in America in 2007?
New York Magazine

2. Best TV channel in 2007?
ABC

3. Best website in 2007?
ffffound.com

4. Best radio personality in 2007?
Robert Siegel

5. Best actor in 2007?
Michael Cera
Cate Blanchet

6. Best advertising client in 07, not our own?
Burger King. Because the client has allowed the agency to constantly experiment, constantly push the limits.

7. Best designer, not a Frog?
Interior designer – Lewis. Tsurumaki Lewis
Kenya Hara ( http://www.ndc.co.jp/hara/home_e/index.html)

8. Best architect?
Renzo Piano

9. Who's the coolest businessperson in 07?
Mark Zuckerberg

10. Who is the most interesting person to watch in 07?
Brad Neely

HOW TO TURN OFF FACEBOOK'S BEACON

Thanks to Nat Ives, I read this wonderful blog entry today by none other than the founder of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg.

Mark Zuckerberg, courtesy of Facebook

THOUGHTS ON BEACON

About a month ago, we released a new feature called Beacon to try to help people share information with their friends about things they do on the web. We've made a lot of mistakes building this feature, but we've made even more with how we've handled them. We simply did a bad job with this release, and I apologize for it. While I am disappointed with our mistakes, we appreciate all the feedback we have received from our users. I'd like to discuss what we have learned and how we have improved Beacon.

When we first thought of Beacon, our goal was to build a simple product to let people share information across sites with their friends. It had to be lightweight so it wouldn't get in people's way as they browsed the web, but also clear enough so people would be able to easily control what they shared. We were excited about Beacon because we believe a lot of information people want to share isn't on Facebook, and if we found the right balance, Beacon would give people an easy and controlled way to share more of that information with their friends.

But we missed the right balance. At first we tried to make it very lightweight so people wouldn't have to touch it for it to work. The problem with our initial approach of making it an opt-out system instead of opt-in was that if someone forgot to decline to share something, Beacon still went ahead and shared it with their friends. It took us too long after people started contacting us to change the product so that users had to explicitly approve what they wanted to share. Instead of acting quickly, we took too long to decide on the right solution. I'm not proud of the way we've handled this situation and I know we can do better.

Facebook has succeeded so far in part because it gives people control over what and how they share information. This is what makes Facebook a good utility, and in order to be a good feature, Beacon also needs to do the same. People need to be able to explicitly choose what they share, and they need to be able to turn Beacon off completely if they don't want to use it.

This has been the philosophy behind our recent changes. Last week we changed Beacon to be an opt-in system, and today we're releasing a privacy control to turn off Beacon completely. You can find it here. If you select that you don't want to share some Beacon actions or if you turn off Beacon, then Facebook won't store those actions even when partners send them to Facebook.

On behalf of everyone working at Facebook, I want to thank you for your feedback on Beacon over the past several weeks and hope that this new privacy control addresses any remaining issues we've heard about from you.

Thanks for taking the time to read this.

Mark

UPDATE: GOOD MAGAZINE - PLANNING FOR GOOD DECENBER 10TH EVENT

Good Magazine is hosting a party for Planning for Good in NYC on the 10th as I wrote in an earlier entry.

For those wondering when/where the event will take place. It's from 7-9pm at the OPENHOUSE GALLERY, 201 Mulberry Street.