Louis Vuitton gets Brand-Jacked, Collateral Damage in Anti-Genocide Campaign:
[Via Web Strategy by Jeremiah]

The article is not only about what happens when a brand is hijacked. It is also a great example of how a organization could use a community it created in order to help itself.

Left Image: An impoverished Darfur child is shown holding an LV-like purse, image sold as a T-shirt from artist, now being sued, see Hi-Res version.

Thanks to Søren Storm Hansen for bringing this to my attention.

It could have been your brand
It could have been Rolex, Lexus, Gucci, or even your brand, sadly for LV, it was theirs.

A 26 year old artist named Nadia Plesner has been sued by Louis Vuitton for brand jacking their famous purses in a anti-genocide campaign.

The artist was trying to make a point that the media cares more for Paris Hilton extravaganzas more than the genocide in the nation of Darfur.

Now Louis Vuitton lawyers did what they are paid to do – protect the brand. Use the law against the artist. But this will also have negative effects on the brand.

What to do? Jeremiah asks his community and they come up with some great ideas, ones that create win-win solutions and actually could help the brand.

LV has two a few options
Here’s my take, from what I can tell, Louis Vuitton (and the dog) have nothing to do with Darfur, and their brand is being dragged through the African mud. Their response is pretty standard and expected, to protect the image and brand that they’ve been working to build. I’m sympathetic to them getting brand jacked, as they’ve not done anything to occur this unwanted attention.Option 1: Continue legal path: Continue this path and settle with Nadia, given the many lawyers they have access to and resources, they will likely win a copyright infringement for the design being on another paid product.

Option 2: Join the campaign: They could drop the suit, and work with the Save Dafur organization to help raise funds by doing events, creating a specific product, or help promote the cause. This too has it’s downsides, the brand will be brought into the human rights spotlight, and if they have any dirt in this arena (perhaps oversees manufacturing) they’ll be in turn scrutinized. Secondly, this would be a nod to activitists everywhere to brand jack major brands in order to get support and funding, the cycle will continue.

Option 3: Redirect focus on issues: Submitted by John Bell. I enjoyed John’s option so much, that I’ve embedded it here on the post as an update. “What they could do is work with Nadia and other artists to host discussions about media focus. They could partner with a neutral party like my friends at ifocos.org to steward the conversation. Keep the discussion away from luxury brands (which is not Nadia’s point anyhow). LV can become part of teh solution without taking on the brunt of an issue they do not own.”

Option 4: Walk away: Submitted by Alison Byrne Fields: “Drop the suit. Walk away and wait for the dust to settle. This little hullabaloo will have no long term negative impact on their brand.”

Originally there were only 2 options. But the community came up with others that were better in many ways. In particular, by following the third option, LV can not only help their brand, they can extend their community and enhance their brand. It would show that they listen to their community and try to find solutions rather than pay lawyers.

The artist wants media to look at the genocide. LV could use its high profile to help do exactly this. It would not drive away their luxury market and could expand it.

A very nice example how a diverse community can propose solutions to difficult problems when Web 2.0 technologies permit online conversations to take place.

Technorati Tags: Web 2.0

by cogdogblog
Business Whitepapers:
[Via pbwiki.]

How Wikis Enable Enterprise Collaboration
The Five Keys to Enterprise-Grade Security and Infrastructure for On-Demand Wikis
Seven Wiki Essentials: The Must-Have Elements of Every Successful Wiki Initiative
[More]

Some very nice whitepapers discussing not only pbwiki and hosted systems but also why wikis are useful in an organization. There are also some very helpful case studies. Some people like to host wikis in-house but this requires a much larger measure of support and attention than a hosted site.

Many of these hosted sites have a lot of security measures to protect the integrity of the data. They also handle backups and hardware. They can often make a big difference with small companies. Particularly those that can not easily provide the time to support an in-house option.

Technorati Tags: Education, Social media, Web 2.0

by aussiegall
Building Your Blogging Corps:
[Via A Journey In Social Media]

Most of these posts have been around how we’re rolling out the platform, getting communities to form, justifying, and so on.

And, as I was thinking about things the other day, I realized I hadn’t exposed all of you to another major theme of what we’ve been working on — building a corps of proficient, outside-the-firewall bloggers doing so on behalf of the corporation.

And, once again, I think we’ve hit upon a pretty good approach — one that I don’t see being employed too much by other companies.

So — let me share.
[More]

And what he shares is very valuable. One of the key points is that good bloggers are not picked by the organization. They pick themselves. The key to having a group of excellent bloggers is to find those people who are excited by the approach and getting them onboard.

He also makes the point that the fear of bad things happening is overblown in his experience, particularly when compared to the good things that happen. The best approach may be to set a few guidelines and let the group work it out.

Most people are self-regulating here because it is open and people can see what they write. A light touch by the corporation seems to work best.

Another novel idea is to use in-house blogging as a sandbox to allow people to learn how to become better bloggers before giving them the opportunity to blog externally. They can learn without having the pressure of millions of people possibly reading them. They can get useful and focussed feedback this way.

Then there is this point, something I have also heard and makes absolute sense:

The other view is at the individual level: everyone who’s blogging for the company will say — unequivocally — that it’s helped them dramatically in their careers.

Everyone knows who they are. Their points of view are widely known and acknowledged. They find that the practice of blogging not only makes them better communicators, but they have far more to say than before.

It’s that Big Career Promotion you do for yourself …

Many people do things to help that are invisible. Answering someone’s question or pointing someone in the right direction may have a huge impact but is often not recognized by the organization. But a blog is pretty public and the help provided by it is much easier to document. It really can be a Win-Win for everyone involved.

Technorati Tags: Social media, Web 2.0

by milesgehm
[Most of the between session music has been pretty generic. But any session that plays Dick Dale before it starts is awesome. And it is one of his recent ones ‘Nitro‘. If they play Miserlou or better yet Pipeline with Stevie Ray Vaughn (bad movie, bad hair, great guitar duo), I may just go up afterwards and congratulate the sound guy. Yes, I love surf guitar and he is the King of the Surf Guitar. One of the two left-handed guitar players who revolutionized the instrument.]

#1 Background about Facebook and all the other social media networks. Talked about media networked devices such as appleTV and iPhone. Only from 1 company. Many other examples.

Now it can get large amounts of money. Now strategy is not how do you close it off but how you work in the open.

#2 RSS and Atom to consume feeds. publishing allows content to be open without accessing publishing site directly. microformats. even MS is going to open microformats.

But open also means privacy. need transparency. OAUTH – ‘valet’ key for the web. can set up access to website. password anti-pattern – importing contact lists without real approval.

so we have ways to share information. and more companies are embracing open standards such as IM clients. allows sites to interact.

ways to know who someone is – openID. happened in last year. microformat XFN – can link profiles from different accounts. link to frineds all around the web. mix social networks, FOAF, XFN and social graph API (Google). Live demo of power of social graph API.

Open Platforms – provides or consumes open api. use standards (when they exist) . Fire eagle. Twitter. plaxo. mashable.com.

Q&A – charlene li – openid took off fast. what is rate of uptake around open standard? it is increasing in a lot of areas. Speed is somewhat misleading since some of it took place at low level for a couple of years before implemented. having to get to stable standard before quick adoption.

What about mobile aspects? email/contacts broken since filtering aspects are hard. want to have email that access social profiles to help identify real friends and not fake friends.

Technorati Tags: Web 2.0

by etech

[More semi-live blogging]

Annalee Newitz – what happens when people game social networks. get on Digg by paying people. social media depends on user-generated material but how to rid oneself of cheats.

social media censorship – bottom up, not top down; collaborative; punitive (the cruelty of crowds); not within terms of service.
here it is users who are making decision.

people get together in groups to remove people from a site for reasons that do not have to do with terms of service. it is personal.

Censorship makes user-generated content less valuable; creates divisiveness; drives community away; it is unjust; fear of posting.

“let’s collaborate to destroy free expression!” Examples – Blogger – Flag blog. sends it to database. not granular or a lot of choices to explain why. if too many people flag it, it becomes unsearchable. no accountability for person doing the flagging.

[in this case, there is no transparency about censoring, which is really done by corporation. not by community. This is really a bad amalgam of bottom up mixed with top down. may not be the best way to do it.]

Flickr – can also flag items but not clear.it also allows people to declare before hand what content may be. it does not make it disappear just harder to get to. Again, transparency of decision why an account is flagged is not readily apparent. A bunch of people or even a competitor could flag an account and make it invisible. Then it requires a long process to fix.

[She is talking from the side of the user, but it would be nice to know more about why companies make their decisions on process or just how many flags need to be sent.]

YouTube has better granularity and takes down things quickly. She has talked with Google about this. But still no transparency.

Digg – can digg or to bury a story. bury is used in ways that some call censorship. Problem with Digg is that how stories moved up or down is not transparent so people use bury to game in a zero-sum game. It is way for people to game system to their own advantage. Does not make things disappear just hard to find. On INternet this can be deadly since we rely on filtering.

Wikipedia – does a reasonable job of providing transparency to flagging. makes it harder for people to expel. It allows community to decide.

Solutions – clear content guidelines. clear and fast routes of redress; easy use of filters to self-moderate.

[This was a very interesting talk. Most sites do not really examine why or how people can game the system to harm other’s visibility. Essentially, by making flagging anonymous and without accountability, they open their systems to being abused. But, sites that make censorship/hiding as open and accountable as they do with posters will have fewer problems.]

Technorati Tags: Web 2.0

Made it through this morning’s keynotes. I did not take any notes. Saving my power. Keynotes are better for inspiring than for new information.So I’m up in the blogger’s lounge, eating a bagel, drinking some coffee and talking with other people about why there is a yoga instructor in a room full of bloggers? Not a lot of interest but the massage guys have a lot of interest. Now that is a great idea!

by etech
Transfer from agrarian to industrial really sold a lot of gin for a generation. it took 30 yeasr before the institutions of industrial revolution we recognize came into being. gin was king.

20th century lubricant – sitcom. 5 day work week, rising middle class. first time had too much free time. filled it with TV. desperate housewives was gin of our times. only now are we starting to see cognitive excess as a plus.

interviewed on TV about book. What is he saying that is interesting? He discussed pluto on wikipedia. pluto dropped from planets. moved with lots of push-pull to move to a large rock.

Where do you find the time? Noone in TV should ask that question. well TV has masked it for 50 years. wikipedia is 100 million of human thought. TV is 200 billion every year. 2000 wikipedia projects a year watch TV a year. 100 million hours each weekend just to watch the ads.

so wikipedia is only a small portion of surplus. so how do you figure out what to do with surplus. no one has any idea of how to deploy it. early phase is all special cases. do not understand how it all fits. can;t predict outputs because of complexity.

try lots of things and hope fail informatively. wikimap for crime in brazil. put pushpin on map. converts tacit information to explicit. cops do not share the info. easier to rebuild from scratch than to get it from authorities.

someone working with cheap tools can have a huge effect. talking about WOW with TV. thought they were at least doing something. watched gilligan only choice. It is better to sit in the basement and pretend to be an elf than to wonder whether if Gilligan will get off the island.

Social participation is better online than to passively watch. media does not understand. only measures consumption. but people also like to produce and to share. so it is being split up not.

also the cognitive surplus is so large. if only 10% is carved out for producing and sharing – results in 10,000 wikipedia projects a year.

is it a fad? it is a shift coser to industrial revolution. society is not growing out of this, it is growing into.

Now has story. 4 year old looking for something behind new TV screen. asked what doing? Looking for the mouse.
screens that ship without a mouse is shipped broken.

media more than just consuming. it is producing and sharing. how to get ahold of cognitive surplus.

by takeshi

enterprise wants in to Web 2.0 heart of it is collective intelligence, it is about using data to provide services.

PageRank begining of web 2.0. people vote by links. wesabe – how people spend their money is a vote. can mine in waays that banks will not. let into back office.

cloud computing – if you are not connected to the cloud, it is worthless.no more computers. connectors to web.

difference between wordpress and facebook – why was facebook worth 15 billion and wordpress only 200M? market values consolidation but this is against where we want to go. web 2.0 is not just putting everything in one pot.

every true web 2.0 is building a database. but this leads to centralized databases which negate positive aspects of web. have to maintain openness.

Mobile – more than iPhone. more important than just a phone. synch online. dashboard on car. use to provide traffic flow from GPS. quake catcher uses Mac accelerometer to detect earthquakes. leads to ambient computing. sensors detect and create database without needing a keyboard.

confluence of tech and circumstance create opportunity to remake world. create congress. public markup.org. InStedd – infectious disease outbreaks. use google earth to track deforestation. alternative energy needs.

don;t follow headlines. go after hard problems. read the man watching by rainier maria rilke.

Technorati Tags: Web 2.0