Month: March 2008

Lenovo’s Olympic Blogging Program

A year ago I presented a plan in Beijing for how Lenovo would support its sponsorship of the 2008 Summer Olympic Games online. I started with the premise that no one in their right mind would seek out and visit the web site of an Olympic sponsor unless they were teased there with the promise of winning something such as a trip to the Games themselves, some Olympic-themed product or souvenir, or the typical contest or sweepstakes. If you look at the Web history of the Olympics, you’d have to declare the first web Games was probably Atlanta, when IBM launched a pretty awesome web presence in light of the technical state of the art in Web 1.0 (sure, IBM took grief for its IT hiccups, but the web site was great). Since then, all the major sponsors have launched sites or microsites for the Games, but no offense, the bar never has really been raised that high.

With that contrarian approach — “who in their right mind would go to a sponsor’s website during the Olympics”  –I needed something beyond the strategy of building an interactive program around a public relations story, a sweepstakes, a contest …. Lenovo already does that sort of thing, every sponsor does in one form or another. That’s a checklist item, not a strategy. Lenovo needs a strong catalyst for a young brand seeking recognition as a global technology innovator on a global scale. Yes, there will be television advertisements running, and the Olympic rings will appear on our magazine ads and on Lenovo products, but I think we need more.

I’ve been nagged for a year by the question of not so much “who” or “how many” would come to a sponsor’s site, but “why.”

Let me set forth some beliefs that have been lighthouses in plotting the course:

  1. These are the first fully Web 2.0 Olympics: however you define “2.0”, these are the Games where social media, tagging, blogging, vlogging …. are all well established and part of the mainstream. Not only for the spectators, but for the athletes.
  2. Athens struck me as the first example of Long Tail media — crude as it was — in that NBC flooded all of its properties, not just the flagship Peacock Network, but CNBC, MSNBC, USA, etc. with a lot of sports, sports I had never seen. I found myself, for the first time, watching badminton and cycling, rowing and sailing, long tail sports the old media model never could support, focusing instead on the marquee events like gymnastics, swimming, basketball, etc.. Beijing, with its time zone differential, and the ubiquity of digital video recorders (Tivo), has even more potential to bring attention to more sports and exposure to more athletes.
  3. What is the Olympic ideal? The idea that propels the Games? In the end, in my opinion, it’s about the athletes. Some 12,000 extraordinarily talented and driven individuals and teams who are literally the best in the world. For me, the consummate athlete is not necessarily the champion who comes away with the gold, but the 11,000 athletes who won’t win a medal, the athletes who don’t have an agent, an endorsement deal, indeed, for some, even a glimmer of hope of standing on the podium hearing their national anthem. I want to know their story. My good friend Luis Felipe Gonzalez III, MD, skied for Puerto Rico in the freestyle mogul competition at the 1998 Winter Games at Nagano. He didn’t do very well, but the fans loved his enthusiasm. My old boss at 21i.net, Fritz Kaiser, represented Liechtenstein at the 1976 Montreal Games in judo. He didn’t win, but he is the consummate competitor.

So it struck me, in working to develop an online strategy for the Lenovo Champions (our team of superstar athletes) that if I were to provide them with blogs and video capabilities then why not offer it to a lot of athletes? Not just the Champions, but the “spares”, the everyman athlete, the person who competes for the love of the game, not the medal, and the potential medalists in the sports that don’t get a lot of television coverage: the kayakers, the archers, the scullers. And it dawned on me that this is a Games of unrestricted abundance. That with the right partner I could scale an idea for 12 people into 12,000 (in theory.)

That partner was Google.

Starting in August we began discussions at the highest levels about using Google’s iGoogle platform to build a sophisticated Olympic platform of our own. It is live, it is http://2008.lenovo.com. It, like iGoogle, is a collection of gadgets and content modules that draw on feeds to present a dynamic stream of customized information. We call it the Lenovo Olympic Podium and thanks to Google’s devoted engineers and passion for these sorts of things, we gained the capability to not only build and host this Podium, but also to develop the most important content stream in the history of the modern Olympic Games.

Here’s my big idea:

What is the main event were the athletes themselves? What if, using Google’s Blogger platform and YouTube capabilities, Lenovo could offer any athlete a way to share their Olympic experience with their fans, family, friends, even the world?

These are not Lenovo blogs. They are not intended to be advertisements for Lenovo or Google. I want to enable athletes in three ways.

  1. Hardware. Over 100 IdeaPads, our new consumer notebook computers, will be given to 100 qualified athletes. The qualification? Must be passionate, be a credible contender, and willing to communicate their story within the International Olympic Committee’s guidelines on Athlete Blogs (these are the first Games in which athletes are really permitted to blog during the Games). We’re also looking into giving them video capabilities through the built in web cam and other devices.
  2. Software. Google will power the blogs with Blogger (if it’s good enough for the Fake Steve Jobs …) and YouTube. Google is all about platforms. They have data centers with cooling towers (I think). These guys can provide infrastructure and innovation, a rare combination.
  3. Support: I’m going to aggregate all these blogs into one big OPML-Blog Roll, aggregated Olympic site. I want to drive the best of the network of what I like to refer to internally as “the IdeaAthletes” and get these athlete bloggers the connection with their fans that the mass media can’t. Ogilvy’s Digital Influence Project in the form of uber bloggers John Bell and Rohit Bhargava are going to help me support the bloggers in the months leading up to the Games and during the competition.

What is the ideal scenario in my mind? The chain of events that will lead someone to declare success and not say “stupid idea, Dave.”

I want to see some valid give and take between athletes and fans. Period and full Stop. I don’t want to see ghost written homilies and comment strings that go unanswered. I certainly don’t want to see Lenovo emblazoned on these blogs or YouTube streams. I won’t expect any blogger to write a sentence like: “I love my IdeaPad and couldn’t have done this without the brilliant Mister Churbuck.” Nope, what I want for Lenovo out of all this is one simple piece of authentic, non-promotional recognition: “We were the PC supplier and sponsor to the Games who first enabled the connection between the fans and the athletes.”

The first athlete to enter the program is Drew Ginn, the Australian rower (okay, I confess to a bias towards rowing, after all, I did write the book), and Olympic gold medalist who is training now to represent Australia in the pair:  a two man boat where each rower has a single or sweep oar. This is a devilishly hard boat to row and demands a level of synchronization and bonding between the two rowers that is impossible for non-rowers to imagine. Drew and his partner, Duncan Free, won the World’s in Munich last summer, making them the boat to beat this August in Beijing.

Drew has been our internal example of exactly what we’re seeking in an IdeaAthlete blogger. He uses Google’s Blogger, he posts videos on YouTube. He understands del.icio.us and Skype – in short, he’s very much the embodiment of a Web 2.0 Olympian. I am really psyched that he’s the first to come aboard.

So, if you’re an Olympian and you want to blog , please ping me. If you already blog about the Olympics but want to do it with an IdeaPad, please ping me. If you want to follow an Olympic blog visit http://2008.lenovo.com and .. ping me.

Regional blog networks — Cape Cod Today

Cape Cod TODAY and WBUR

One of the better destinations in my daily rounds of the virtual landmarks is Cape Cod Today, an aggregation of blogs covering local news and opinion around Cape Cod and the islands. (Walter Brooks, the  ex-New York Post founder extended an invite to me to contribute, but I am far happier on my own server covering non-Cape Cod stuff as well as the occasional clam rant.)
Cape Cod Today is significant for a number of reasons. First, if a network of bloggers such as the Huffington Post can be said to be the future of national media, then Cape Cod Today is driving home the impact of blogs on local coverage, bringing life to the local “news hole” in a way that a budget challenged daily paper cannot. I don’t see CCT as a replacement for the Cape Cod Times — but as a bit of an anarchy laden, opinion-filled news that brings tired staples of the local press — the police log for example, to vivid life. Cape Cod Today broke the Wampanoag casino scandal last summer, through the reporting of Peter Kenney — aka the Gadfly — a fixture of the local cable-talk radio circuit. That scoop focused a lot of attention on CCT and sealed its reputation as a credible daily news source.
As always, the action is in the comments. Gauging from the ad count, the site is doing pretty well. Here is a transcript of a recent NPR profile of the network.

“He is known as the Blogfather of Cape Cod, Walter Brooks. Since 2003, Brooks has recruited 150 Cape bloggers to cover Cape news from tip to toe. All but five of the bloggers write for free. Most of them turn out opinion pieces. But most of them are also retirees, or are still working in their current professions. Their backgrounds are varied: ex-politicians, ex-policemen, ex-teachers, current teachers, current harbormasters, current artists. Not a pimple-faced pajama wearing basement blogger among them.

Brooks admits many of the blogs on Cape Cod Today are hit or miss. Many of them are nothing more than a daily rant. Nevertheless, he believes they are changing the way news is covered on the Cape, and that they’re breaking news.”

Cape’s electric rates among nation’s highest

CapeCodTimes.com – Cape’s electric rates among nation’s highest

Sucks to be me. Nothing like a $400 monthly electric bill during air conditioner season to make one a believer in the wind farm.

“The average cost of electricity is higher on Cape Cod than it is in any state in the continental United States. Nationwide only Hawaiians pay more per kilowatt hour, according to the Energy Information Administration of the U.S. Department of Energy.”

Leveraging The Internet In The Recession – Forbes.com

Mark Babej has good thoughts on the strength of net marketing as cash strapped consumers use the interweb for price comparison and deal seeking.

Leveraging The Internet In The Recession – Forbes.com
In good times, when consumers feel cash-rich and time-poor, they can afford to be less diligent about their spending. But as economic pressures mount, sentiment changes. People feel cash-poor and are more willing to invest time and effort in getting the best deal.

What sets the current recession apart is that, for the first time, consumers have a tool that empowers them to subject everyday buying decisions to the kind of scrutiny formerly reserved for big-ticket items and large business-to-business transactions.

Marketers should anticipate this shift. They will not be able to rely on ads to pull the wool over consumers’ eyes–or on imagery to wow them.

Maybe even more important, it won’t be as easy for companies to control the expense line to make up for the loss of top-line revenues. In past downturns, cutting corners on quality has been a virtually foolproof way to cut costs and boost margins, at least in the short-run.

Not this time. Not when consumers can set the bar higher and easily find what they want at the lowest possible price. Not when any degradation of product quality or crummy service experience is subject to being instantly “outed” by the bloggers and reviewers on the myriad user-generated consumer review sites.

Gillmor blogging at eWeek — Twitter as the platform

Cote of RedMonk twitters that Gillmor is blogging at eWeek. This is good, but interestingly, he’s chasing the Twitter thing as I have been for the past couple weeks, rethinking my initial skepticism thanks to the convenience of twhirl on the desktop.

NewsGang
Today’s brainstorm is Twitter. When it first surfaced I circled it like a bear does a baby seal – not quite looking at it, not believing it could be such an easy target, having no idea whatsoever of its apparent or eventual usefulness. But something about this stupid 140-character limit and haughty self-promotional beacon in the cybernight gave off an eery glow, the faint hint of what is coming. Twitter, when combined with such obscure hacks as TinyURL, podcasts, blogs, and most disruptively I suggest, executable code, has spawned a communications platform that will blow right past everything except platforms that allow it to dominate.

tecosystems » St Patrick’s Day 101

tecosystems » St Patrick’s Day 101

Always take St. Pat’s advice from someone who’s last name has an apostrophe in it. From Mister O’Grady:

What to wear when you’re eating and drinking
Something green, I think. Though apparently the answer was once blue, which I hadn’t known. To be honest, my attention to the dress aspect of St Patrick’s day is only slightly better than that I devote to dress generally. The only thing you absolutely cannot wear is orange. Particularly in Southie; just trust me on this one.

And on this fine day, thinking of our man in Beijing, Mister Mann, who found a good use for a Chinese tailor.

The Hibernians

In acknowledgment of St. Patrick’s Day – a holiday arguably bigger than Christmas for many people in Eastern Massachusetts – I want to go back in time to the early 1980s when I was the statehouse bureau chief and political editor for the gritty Lawrence Eagle-Tribune, a mill city PM daily with a circulation of 60,000 and a reach into southern New Hampshire. I do not recall my days at the Eagle-Tribune fondly. It was an amazing underpaid stress-fest only made interesting by the lunacy of the subject matter.

Last month, on the day of the New Hampshire primary, I blogged about my days chasing the 1984 presidential campaign through the Granite State, but that was nothing compared to the St. Pat’s tradition of the political lunch at the Ancient Order of Hibernians in Lawrence. Every alderman, mayor, state representative and senator, congressman and ex-congressman, party official, attorney general, judge, even presidential candidate would cram into the AOH and roar with well-greased laughter at the patter and jokes of Billy Bulger, the leprechaunesque president of the Senate (brother to Whitey Bulger of the Winter Hill Gang, and the fugitive the Jack Nicholson character in Scorcese’s The Departed was loosely based on).

I was a minor leaguer, the home town guy in the grand scheme of things, an anomaly due to the perception by most local pols that I must be a closet Republican due to my very detestable English middle name, my prep school and Ivy league ties, and my incurable shyness and propensity to blush when made fun of, which most of my sources delighted in doing constantly and in public. But … I was the grandson of Kenneth McKiniry, who had coached a local town’s football and basketball teams to several state championships, and once I dropped that name I was given a hug, a mug of green beer, and that paragon of Bay State cuisine: the boiled dinner (corned beef, cabbage, and potatoes).

I was also bartending a few nights a week in Boston to make ends meet and attempt to pay down my college loans. Boston bartenders live in utter dread of two days every year – St. Pat’s and the Boston Marathon. St. Pat’s because every suburban amateur drunkards floods into Boston for a day of public intoxication and micturation, and Boston Marathon because bulimic mid-life crisis cases would stagger into the bar in their running shorts and Nikes wrapped in a silver mylar space blanket and celebrate their four hour ordeal from Hopkinton with a Sam Adams which would invariably lay them out on the floor.

I don’t think working for a global PC company would have crossed my mind in those days of bare knuckle reporting and bartending. The smell of cabbage, sour beer, and the sight of the Celtics logo will always bring such memories rushing back.

 

Whereabouts week of 3.17

3.17 – Monday, Evacuation Day: Cotuit

3.18- Tuesday, Cotuit to RTP

3.19 – Wednesday RTP

3.20 – Thursday RTP to Cotuit

3.21 – Good Friday — likely will take off in Cotuit

3.22-3.23 – Easter weekend Cotuit

Following week of the 24th is medical week — checkups, physicals etc. so Cotuit is where I’ll be.

Opening Day

Ten days until opening day for the Red Sox and I thought I’d confess my return to the Sox after regaining the zeal like a classic rainy day fan in 2004 when they broke the curse.

I was an old school Sox freak, back in the mid-60s, when the 1967 Sox lost the World Series to St. Louis and started a forty year tradition of disappointing me and a few million other people each and every fall.

The final straw was 1986, when that retard John McNamara left Bill Buckner in the sixth game against the Mets so Bill could be on the field to celebrate when the Sox won the series.

Hah.

For the next 18 years I literally would avert my eyes, change the channel, turn the page, or excuse myself if the words “Red Sox” came anywhere in my vicinity. I gave up. The rage attack I displayed when Buckner dropped the ball was so profoundly primal that I had to stop watching for my own health.

It took a freak-a-zoid son who is an ultra fan to drag me back into the game,
So, with ten days to go, and on the eve of that other classic Massachusetts Milestone — Evacuation Day (the Suffolk County holiday commemorating the day the British abandoned Boston under the threat of George Washington’s guns on Dorchester Heights, and which coincidently falls on St. Patrick’s Day, a nice benefit for all those city woikers who need their green beer) I present to you three good Sox Blogs:

1.  Wicked Clevah: From Stephen O’Grady at Redmonk, is this side-blog with a high obsessive compulsive humor factor.

2. Joy of Sox: very, very funny.  The Nickname Guide is essential reading.

3. Surviving Grady: courtesy of O’Grady, this is by far one of the funniest things I’ve read.