A few weeks back, the folks at the TLC book tours, asked me if I was interested in participating in the book tour to support the launch of Clay Shirky’s latest book, Cognitive Surplus. Despite the fact that my calendar looks like someone took a shotgun approach to booking time, and despite the fact that my spare time is absorbed by a cute three year old, and despite the fact that I read books at the pace of a snail, I jumped at the chance.

Cognitive Surplus takes the essay Shirky wrote a while back, “Gin, Television, and Social Surplus”, and turns it into a full book. The essay was a fascinating read, and Part 1 of the book takes a deeper look at his premise.

And to be perfectly honest, I haven’t made it past the first part of the book. It’s incredibly interesting, and I have highlighted the ever loving hell out of those pages. I’ve read the first part of the book twice, and may read it a third time before moving on to the rest of the book.

Shirky has, if his theory can be trusted, clearly shown a social and mental motivation behind the question “Who has time to do that?” When you eliminate millions, if not billions of hours of television watching from our collective schedules, suddenly you have plenty of time to edit wikipedia pages, post LOLcat images, help out in tech support forums, and update your Facebook status every 4 minutes.

This book isn’t a business book, and it’s not technically a history book. At least not yet. But I’m pretty convinced that when my daughter or my grandkids look back to find out how the history of this era unfolded, Cognitive Surplus is going to be one of the books that helps explain that history.

Even though I’m not all the way through the book, I strongly recommend reading. And while I work my way through the rest of the book, you should see what other on the book tour had to say. Here’s a few past and future stops:

Tuesday, June 22nd: Being Peter Kim
Thursday, June 24th: Graywolf’s SEO Blog
Tuesday, June 29th: Convince and Convert
Thursday, July 8th: Social Media Explorer
Wednesday, July 14th: Debbie Weil
Thursday, July 15th: Beth’s Blog
Monday, July 19th: A Whole Lotta Nothing
Wednesday, July 21st: Web Strategy by Jeremiah Owyang
Thursday, July 22nd: Six Pixels of Separation
Monday, July 26th: Community Guy
Wednesday, July 28th: Citizen Marketer 2.1
Thursday, July 29th: Nine By Blue
Tuesday, August 3rd: Socialbrite

I’m not sure what more I can say to describe The Illusionist. Fantastic acting, writing, directing. But the most fantastic was the visual style this story was filmed in. Incredible style that places the viewer firmly in the time period. It’s been a while, even with other good movies, that I’ve wanted to run back to the theater for a second viewing.

Here’s the cool part though – the studio created both MySpace and YouTube presence. The YouTube promo is the most intriguing – film your own illusion, post it to YouTube and maybe see the trick show up on The Illusionist DVD. What a great idea, considering this is a zero cost solution for the studio, and taps into something significant for fans.

The only thing I was disappointed about is that they don’t give any info about how the illusions from the movie might have been done. Hopefully they’re holding that back for the DVD.

But this is a two thumbs WAY up movie, with a visual style so incredible you want to ask them to pause occasionally just so you can soak it in.

• Children of Men
• The Queen
• American Hardcore
• Flyboys
• The Illusionist
• Lover Boy (The cast of Singles seems to have reunited…)
• Stranger Than Fiction (A rare thing – an inventive plot)
• Babel
• Sherrybaby
• The Amateurs
• Catch a Fire
• The Last King of Scotland

I’m not sure why I’ve been putting off writing about Y: The Last Man. Since March, this series of books has been my No. 1 obsession.

The premise is simple and provocative: What if a mysterious disease instantly killed every man on Earth … except one? As a result, all world leaders would be women. Armies would be 100% female. Of course, all criminals would be women, too — and once word gets out about the living man, some will go to any lengths to track him down.

Here’s a PDF of the first few pages to get you started.

I’ve been a huge fan of the series since issue 3 (going back and picking up issues 1 and 2, of course). Interestingly, even though I have every individual issue, I still go buy the collected volumes. Why? It seems like such a waste.

There’s a couple of reasons – reading 10 issues all at once in one flowing form is a different experience than waiting obsessively to get each new issue when it comes out. Brian K. Vaughn, the uber-talented writer does a fantastic job of leaving you with a cliff hanger at the end of each installment, but also moves the story along so you don’t feel strung out like many TV shows do.

The experience is worth it, but it’s dependent on a solid foundation of content. Vaughn is a sharp, witty writer who doesn’t insult the audience by spelling things out. More than once I’ve looked up a cultural reference after finishing the book. The artwork is also compelling, as is the overall concept, and pacing.

Great experiences are great because they come with the entire package. LEGO built loyalty well beyond other brands because they have great involvement with consumers, a value system that they (mostly) communicate effectively, and because the product is rock solid. Not surprisingly, when the product quality suffered, the rest of the equation could only prop it up for so long.

Thanks, Andy!

UPDATE: Andy just told me I’m the first one to blog this story. Woo hoo! First!

But overall this is another fun, fast read from Seth.

But by  SoaP Day, I was completely excited to see the movie. What caused the bump in interest? Two things… the first was the SoaP voicemail. Being able to send hilarious voicemails to my friends was a ton of fun. The second was seeing Samuel L. Jackson on the Daily Show. It’s not often that you see actors having so much fun when doing the press tour. Fun seems to be the key to this entire adventure, and fun has moved SoaP into lead spot at the box office. My review of the movie? Fun, fun, fun. Even my wife had a good time.

You’ll notice that, despite the attention being heaped on the fan efforts, what really sparked my interest was a studio created Web design project, and an old school media spot. Does this mean that fan efforts are still largely irrelevant? Not at all.

If you look at how the process of this movie creation played out, you’ll see a big mix of fan and studio efforts. You had the lead actor posting messages on online forums about changing the title, which kicked off a flurry of fan discussion. Fans found fun in the concept and started to develop content…by the metric ton. The studio changed the marketing efforts for the movie in reaction to the new found fan enthusiasm. Fans were engaged and thus more willing to engage, to give feedback, to offer support in building buzz. The studio helped to encourage these efforts by running traditional marketing efforts.

Snakes on a Plane isn’t a story about the power of fan support. It’s not even a story about the pitfalls of movie making by committee. It’s a story about the ecosystem that can be created when an organization works with their end consumers to create something bigger than either group alone.

According to Wikipedia, “in general terms an ecological system can be thought of as an assemblage of organisms living together with their environment, functioning as a loose unit.”

When in balance, ecosystems are surprisingly robust, growth happens, species flourish, everyone grows. In terms of consumer interaction, this is what I talk about when my mantra “Everybody goes home happy”.

But when an ecosystem is thrown off balance, it can easily and quickly fall apart. This is what happens when marketers think of the fan community as nothing more than “free marketing”. This is what happens when fans forget that businesses need to make money in order to stay in business. In an “Community Ecosystem”, much of the burden for maintaining that balance falls to the marketer, whether than like it or not. Marketers have the budgets, they have the time, and they have the vested interest in ensuring that the ecosystem stays viable.
 
Will New Line continue to foster and support the ecosystem that has formed around SoaP? Will it help it flourish into something far more encompassing than one movie? We’ll see. But if they don’t, and if this ecosystem collapses, they’ll have only themselves and a lack of vision to blame.

I largely forgot my love of Superman as I got older. After catching several Superman Returns trailers in front of other movies in the last few months, I was largely unmoved.

But when I saw the latest trailer with the music (you know… THE Superman theme), I got goosebumps and childhood memories washed over me like I was 7 years old in the park, post-viewing of the first Superman movie wondering how I could grow up to be Christopher Reeve/Clark Kent.

Needless to say, I’ll be catching Superman Returns in the theater. (And by the looks of the reviews, I won’t be sorry come June 28!)

How does this relate to community stuff? Largely, it doesn’t directly. But it did bring home the points that Martin Lindstorm was making in his presentation I recently caught about "Smashing Brands". (Basically using all of the senses to get your brand message across)

It’s also interesting to note that when you google "Superman Returns", these are the three sites that come up first:

1. Offical Warner Site
2. IMDB listing
3. BlueTights.net – the fan site (They even have a cool MySpace group)

BlueTights is an interesting project. It’s a fan site, but has given over parts of the site to Bryan Singer, the movie’s director.

Peter Jackson started this trend when working together with fans on King Kong, and it’s great to see Singer pick up the ball and run. Hopefully others follow suit.

So why would you invite opportunity to look stupid, confused, and clueless?

I sent HBO an email a few days back after hearing rumors of their great series Deadwood being cancelled. This was the automated response I got back:

(I know it was auto-generated because another blogger posted the same message last week)

Considering that the show, despite fan efforts, was in fact cancelled last week, this line from the auto-response comes across as trying to hide the truth:

Beloved cast? Latitude to pursue other projects? Yikes. If they’d just been honest and dropped the PR-speak I might have been impressed and the openness. As it is, it just looks like they were trying to hide from my upset.

It’s easy to look stupid to your consumers – don’t make it easier.

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In an era of decreasing TV ad effectiveness, launching a business that allows mom and pop to create clip art ads seems to be a brilliant solution for helping increase the speed of the death spiral of TV ads.

I’m honestly at a loss for words on how bad of an idea this is. Think of the handshake image in Powerpoint presentations. You know you’ve seen a few….hundred…of those in your time. Now that same annoyance can come to TV….