360DigitalInfluence

This week, we turned our weekly DI staff meeting into a digital show and tell. Our DC team of designers, developers, strategists, art directors and producers shared some of the videos, websites, digital experiences and apps outside of our own work that we think are cool, cutting-edge, inspiring or just fun to watch. So, take a break from online holiday shopping working and enjoy our Best of the Web picks.

Israeli rocker Yoni Bloch’s “choose-your-own-adventure” music video is a must-watch. Viewers can interact with the video, seamlessly changing the course of events as the song continues. Yoni’s  a rock star off the stage too. He’s the founder of Interlude, the interactive video technology company behind this video and may others.

For a little more music to your ears, Philips partnered with the Metropole Orchestra on an interactive campaign to showcase their audio products. Viewers can single out individual musicians, hearing each note in a track played by the entire orchestra.

Cute kids, pets, people that take awkward to a new level… We love a good montage of the year’s best viral videos.  79 all wrapped into one great restrospective.

If you’re in the mood for a more serious look back at 2011, watch this Google Zeitgeist year in review video. From natural disasters to political uprisings, see the events and people that shaped our year. (You might need a tissue. Just sayin…)

Indie band Arcade Fire wowed us last year with The Wilderness Downtown, a personalized music video experience that used HTML5 and Google Maps. This year, they have us dancing at our desks with Sprawl II. We enjoyed the sweet moves of one of our creative directors, as he demoed how the computer camera detects movement and incorporates it into the video.

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User-generated content can be an inexpensive, effective way to boost the video component of a campaign and increase brand engagement. But the downside is that you have very little control over the content and quality of the video that’s coming back to you … video you assured your client would be a great addition to their program and representative of their brand. (Is anyone else breaking into a cold sweat?)

As much as you’d like to be at every shoot with a professional crew to ensure material with real viewer benefit is being created, lighting looks good, and all cell phones with a Macarena ring tone are silenced … it’s not feasible on a limited budget. When you’re counting on fans to create their own videos or mailing Flip cameras to bloggers … just pressing record doesn’t cut it. These simple production tips will provide direction when you can’t be there to call the shots … and help you when you’re putting on your producer hat and filming the content yourself.
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Reading tweets from Charlie Sheen makes me feel like I’m hallucinating. Warlocks hungering for corporate flesh, tiger blood, violent torpedoes of truth … Thomas Jefferson? Yet, over 2.3 million people have hopped on the Sheen Twitter train to Crazy Town, helping him set the Guinness World Record for fastest user to hit one million followers. While most of us wish he’d get some help, quit smoking cigarettes through his nose, and take a break from broadcasting his meltdown via social media channels, it’s unlikely.

As Sheen told TMZ, the reason he’s taken up Twitter is simple – it’s a “cash cow”. The more he rambles about trolls, the more money he could rake in from advertising. Considering that he’s out of work — the discovery of Adonis DNA will probably happen before the Sober Valley Lodge becomes a no-tweet zone. Plus, he’s winning. “Duh!”

And other brands are too. Spirit Airlines $27 one-way fare ad, Living the Dream, was based on Sheen-isms. From Target to McDonalds, even the Red Cross – big names are incorporating Sheen trends (#winning, #tigerblood) into their tweets to increase awareness of their own social presence and initiatives.

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On Wednesday around noon, half of the 10th floor at Ogilvy Washington made a mass exodus to the corner of 20th and L … all in the name of grilled cheese served out of a truck. Not many things make a large group of very busy people suddenly crave the same lunch and wait outside in the cold for it. While gourmet food trucks are nothing new in cities across the US, the excitement surrounding them hasn’t waned. Why? Because their whereabouts are unpredictable, they exude an air of mystery … and you can personally beg them via Twitter to go to your neck of the woods, not Virginia.

Like many of the clients we work with, food trucks’ entire business models are built on social media and word of mouth. It’s their lifeline. But with more mobile businesses staking their claim on street corners, these entrepreneurs can’t just tweet about their coordinates or shortages of bulgogi steak and call it a day. Thanks to new technology and mainstream acceptance of the trend (restaurants and fast food chains are getting in on the action), food truck entrepreneurs are thinking outside the box to keep customers coming back for more. Here are some online and offline tactics we’re seeing:

Online:

•    Mobile Meteor just launched a new app (it works with an existing Twitter account) that optimizes food truck websites for smartphones, so they can reach new customers who may not use Twitter as regularly. A Google map feature with their exact location will automatically appear on the mobile site. With half of all Americans expected to own smartphones by the end of 2011, it will be interesting to see how many trucks go this “route”.

•    Huge corporations see the value of reaching consumers through food trucks — Virgin America worked with Loopt and rebranded two taco trucks in California with specials to market the airline’s new flights to Mexico.

•    Food trucks are joining forces on tracker sites, like Food Truck Fiesta (DC) and Mobile Cravings (which covers about 30 cities), making it simple for fans to get a quick glimpse at the daily food truck scene.
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