BIGstage

Yep - that's me as ghost lady



And now, here’s the moment you’ve all been waiting for…

Yes, this is my silver screen debut.. ok, it’s a remake.. I mean.. well, I was basically photo-shopped in.. but it’s cool, right?

Welcome to BIGstage – this company creates an avatar from your picture (Much quicker than setting up Second Life), then puts your face in the movies! Ok, a snippet of the movies, or maybe a video-greeting card (VidiGreet).

The promise is that you might just become famous – if your video is spread virally by all of your friends and theirs. The cost, of course, is FREE.

I think the coolest part is what’s in it for BIGstage! Finally, an internet company has figured out that using Web 2.0 technology to help us interact online with the project will appeal to us MUCH better than a bunch of banner ads. Also, by putting our face in these videos and sharing them with our friends, our friends have a trusted representative pitching products to them. This is what it’s all about.

As far as I could tell, they didn’t have much to advertise yet (C’mon ad groups, there’s a GOLD MINE here). I surmised all of this from their Overview page (more here http://bigstage.com/CMS/company). I couldn’t have said it better myself:

Consumers Enjoy Brand Engagement That Includes Them
Big Stage Entertainment makes advertising and promotional marketing truly personal by offering a brand experience that is as unique and memorable as each individual. Using Big Stage Entertainment’s BackStage™ application and array of integration solutions, clients and partners can create innovative interactive experiences that allow consumers to create @ctors and engage with brands by inserting their @ctors into branded content on the Web, in video games, on mobile devices and out-of-home video via kiosks and connected screens. The company’s integration solutions include an expanding array of free and priced technical resources, including APIs, widgets, design references and instruction sets that power @ctor portability into a diverse and expanding range of digital media environments.
Once consumers place themselves into content offered by a brand, that experience can be shared with friends and family through pass-along links to email, blogs, messaging and social media networks, offering a simple yet powerful way to build emotionally-driven brand relationships, as well as drive both trial and loyalty with consumers.

Indecisive? Try Hunch.

The advent of the internet is called the “information age.” We use the web to help us make decisions by easily finding information about things that would have been out of our reach a generation ago. This is obvious with research material – we are no longer limited to our local libraries’ catalogues, we can find information from books and journals around the globe.

Web 2.0 adds to published information, helping us make decisions based on others’ ratings and comments. If ten people dislike a new restaurant, I probably will too, so I can decide not to go there. If a bridesmaid’s dress gets a 4 ½ star rating from 244 amazon users, but the top 5 ratings state the dress is larger than the size chart suggests, I will buy the dress a size small. Their experience leads to my decision.

But – what about tough decisions, like whether to buy a Mac or a PC if you are looking for a new laptop? There are too many opinions on this one to sort through the user reviews, and there is too much information published by Apple, IBM, CNET, and other experts to determine which is really better for me.

There is now an online tool that helps people make these decisions - Hunch. Hunch quizzes users on their likes and dislikes, then helps them figure how to handle an unknown. Their algorithm is based on other users’ similar responses.

For instance, Hunch has determined that the choice between a Mac and a PC can be based on whether a person likes to dance or not. Dancers prefer the Mac.
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/04/17/people-who-switch-to-macs-like-to-dance-and-other-strange-hunches/

Only problem so far, I haven’t been able to try it - I’m still waiting for the invitation to come through in my email account.

More good information about Hunch from the Hunch fact sheet http://www.hunch.com/fact-sheet/:

“What problem does Hunch solve?
Our long-term goal is for a user to be able to come to Hunch with any decision she is pondering, and after answering a handful of questions, get as good a decision as if she had interviewed a group of knowledgeable people or done hours of careful research online.
“Eventually, when Hunch gets good enough, we hope users will trust it to make an informed decision without having to turn to lots of external time-consuming sources of information.”

“Hunch uses machine learning to get smarter in two ways:
“User contributions train Hunch to be smarter overall. Contributions can take many forms, from correcting a fact that Hunch got wrong, to suggesting new decision topics to feature, follow-up questions to ask or decision results to propose.
“The more Hunch learns about each individual user's personality and preferences, the better Hunch can customize decision results for that user. It's like a friend getting to know someone's taste and preferences over time, so they can provide sound and trusted advice.”

Poor attempt to personalize

I got my “mine.” magazine, which I first discussed in this blog. Wow – seriously disappointing.

I knew they were going to customize Lexus ads to fit me. This was about as personal as junk mail. They even highlighted with a lighter color those sections of the ad that had been obviously mail-merged. I’ve had some experience with mail-merging, so this is what it looked like to me:
“The All-New 2010 RX. Now with more [FName] [LName].”
“It’s easy to locate the best [Destination1]s near [City] with our new voice-activated Navigation System.”

I had high hopes that the money Lexus put into this effort would have been better spent on tools to actually personalize the ads. This was plain key ring-style personalization.

The magazine also disappointed me. They totally got it wrong. Because I had to sign up for 5 out of 8 choices (3 of which I didn’t really want), I couldn’remember which I had signed up for. I think I signed up for Time, Real Simple, In Style, Money, and Travel+Leisure – in THAT order. I was really hoping that at LEAST the order I put my choices in would be considered – like, more articles from Time and fewer from Travel+Leisure. It wasn’t.

I may have signed up for Food & Wine instead of In Style. However, I’m totally positive I didn’t sign up for Sports Illustrated or Golf Magazine. What came in my “mine.” was Travel+Leisure, Real Simple, Time, In Style, and Sports Illustrated. WHAT?

The articles didn’t seem to be “picked” for me either – I think they were picked for this magazine. They were all very short, and had lots of references to stuff you can find online. One whole article (in In Style) was about jeans you can have custom-made online. I understand that a lot of what we do includes using the web, so I am used to articles referring to websites, but these articles seemed to include more “.coms” than most.

The straw that broke the camel’s back was the ridiculous advertising for the magazines I had selected. Before each set of 2 short articles, an entire page was dedicated to pointing out exactly which magazine the articles were from. White space and a bold magazine title. I don’t care about the magazine, I care about the content! That’s why I wanted “mine.” instead of each magazine! What a total waste of money.

This should have been easy. Use my name, location, and survey answers to send me relevant articles from the magazines I chose. Determine whether personalization is successful by asking me if I want to pay to keep subscribing to “mine.”

When I wrote this blog, I thought “mine.” was an attempt by a magazine company to sell more magazines by leveraging some of the lessons online companies have learned, and tools they use for personalization. Now, I think this is just a big ad to sell more of the same magazines – without any customization.

Wow, what a miss.