Cam Balzer's Web-Cite

The Last 24hrs at Threadless

1. Got interviewed by a Threadless community member for a long running series of staff interviews. So now I have somewhere to point people if they ask what I do and what my philosophy of life is. Getting the Skinny with Cam (thx Lunchboxbrain!)
2. Threadless showed up on a hugely cheeseball show called "Extreme Workplaces" along with my former employer Google, eBay and some other crazy pads.
3. Tried to do the Facebook Thursday hourly giveaways, but the hourly video clips kept failing. So we went ahead with houry comments and we still had HUNDREDS of comments from Threadless fans, including these 200+ people sharing mini life stories (factual and fictional) and these 700+ people suggesting captions for a picture of Bob in a Banana suit.
4. Launched a new mini app on Facebook to get more sharing of our tees going. Early results strong.
5. Watching the twitter counter tick towards 500K and wondering what new portal of the marketing universe will spring open then. 
6. Planning more awesome extremeness and extreme awesomeness that will have to wait for another update. No holds barred.

Maria Taylor at Threadless

Now that I'm living the social marketing dream at Threadless, I should have lots of cool "citings" to report like this visit with video of singer Maria Taylor and her touring mates The Whispertown 2000.

Lot's more to come when I get a bit further up the ping pong and learning curves...

blogging the process

GE Adventure: cool idea. let's hope they can keep it going...

This is a blog about a project we are doing for GE. We are from The Barbarian Group, an online marketing company, and GE hired us to help them with their internet behavior, so this is our marketing journal where we will show you what we find and talk about what we might do next.

Google uncloaks once-secret server | Business Tech - CNET News

Google uncloaks once-secret server: geeky goodness... so those shipping container rumors were based in substance after all

Aphorism for the times?

In good times, prepare for worse. In bad times, prepare for better.

Just trying it out! Whaddya think? Should I make it a life strategy?

-- update: Caveat: This aphorism may not apply to THE Times--or other newspapers--in these times.

The line between flogging and word of mouth

Whatever else it produced, P&G's recent social media "hackathon" (of sorts), it gave one blog maven a first-hand experience of the inherent challenge of marketing to your personal network:

The fact that P&G was willing to experiment publicly (especially in the wake of recent backlashes, e.g. Motrin) is courageous. They took us all right out there on the limb with them, but for some of us climbing back down before we broke any of our personal network's branches, was the only thing to do. ("Hey Buddy, Wanna Buy a T-shirt?": Notes from Inside P&G's Digital Marketing Hack-a-thon - Jory Des Jardins)

Let's hope all parties involved bear this lesson in mind when the ask consumers to "participate" in their social marketing campaigns...

aakash nihalani: 2D or not 3D?

This is really bold and utterly ephemeral all at once. Carves a 3D space out of completely mundane (two dimensional?) surfaces: aakash nihalani's Flickr Photostream and see the street art section of his site: www.aakashnihalani.com...

Kind of resonant with El Tono: this and esp this...

Workforce 2.0

Gary Hamel on Managing Generation Y - the Facebook Generation - WSJ

If we're up to Generation F already, I'm f'ing old! Hamel applies some of the rallying cries of web 2.0 to emerging workforce expectations. Obvious conclusion: the open source, long tail, collaborative meritocracy of the web doesn't bode well for the established structures of doing business.

Top 10 Reputation Tracking Tools Worth Paying For

Top 10 Reputation Tracking Tools Worth Paying For.

Social amplification in action

Citysearch: Each Item Shared Through Facebook Connect Generates 30 Clicks. I've heard anecdotal results like this before but here it is in print. Those are pretty compelling results, esp at a cost of, um, FREE!