I love the guys at Eqal, and I’m excited to see Harper’s Globe and Harper’s Island play out.  But I question their new strategy to create a community outside of YouTube and force people to sign-up to yet another community.  If you login to their micro-site,  you’ll notice that you can either use an existing cbs account,  or choose to create an Eqal account. I get their long-term goal,  but I’m not convinced. Yet.

As of now I don’t see any added benefit to joining their community— there is no access to additional content or tools surrounded the content that I can’t live without.

Plus, there are over 100x more comments happening on YouTube at the moment, and as one new member of Harper’s Globe puts it,  “Why aren’t y’all hanging out at the Comment Party on YouTube?”

I still have faith in these guys and hope their on to something.  It will be good for brands and content creators alike to be able to migrate to outside sites.  But I’m just not seeing enough motivation yet.  Plus, this kind of strategy is reliant on evergreen content.

Saqoosha rocks.

(It’s true, I often find myself daydreaming about all of the things I want to do with this technology)

We really need to stop using the word “Advertising” — there is so much baggage attached to that word that it devalues people in the industry that really are trying to make a difference.  I am guilty of using the word, only because we need a common vocabulary in order to communicate.  

I think that we are at a key moment when new words have to be invented in order to shed excess baggage. The term “Creative Marketing” might work for now.  

Sean Ellis, Startup Marketing Blog (via betaworks)

The key word in this sentence is “useful”— that’s where brands need to play. They don’t even need to necessarily be innovative.  And no one should be “gaming” anything online unless we’re talking about gambling or games themselves.  The environment is too transparent for that!  It’s much better to partner.

I heard a story a couple of days ago about Happy Joel that made me very happy. He’s a professional brand video contest participant.

In 2008 he entered the Nature Valley Granola Bar competition answering the question “What is your favorite nature place?”—  winning, among other things, a 3 week cruise to Antarctica.

A couple months later he enters another competition for Klondike that he conveniently shoots and stages on location in Antarctica — winning a whopping $100,000 and a trip to NYC to meet the Lonely Island guys.

Now that’s “brand optimization.”

I chatted with Rocketboom creator Andrew Baron yesterday about Know Your Meme.  He has an interesting model and philosophy on how to launch new shows and grow an audience without losing your shirt in the process:  Take it at a snail pace.

For example, this past year he used his current Rocketboom audience as essentially a mini focus group.  He introduced both the Know Your Meme segment, and Intel sponsored Tech Culture to the mix— making Rocketboom a seven day-a-week program versus five.

Then once enough people started to subscribe separately to Meme,  he slowly moved it over to its own site and show page.

Perhaps the long tail (or long nose?) model of smelling out your audience should apply to internet show piloting.  This seems obvious.  But then why do so many people try to launch multiple shows faster than they can pay for them?

I’ve been following 99 Dollar Music Videos— another fun idea from our friends at NNN.  I like the rules.  I’m trying to imagine a site that has the same mission, except replaces the word “band” with “brand.”