What was the brand manager’s reaction? “It’s an entertaining phenomenon … [but] doesn’t fit with the brand personality of Diet Coke”… Indeed.

The reason I chose this specific video is because of Steve Ballmer’s Developers remix. There’s a ton of others – DIY “how to mix mentos and coke” videos.

Tags: anarchy, branding, community, marketing, media, user created content, video

anarchy, branding, community, marketing, media, user created content, video

The Queen turns 80 today

It is music-related, so if you’ve put your money on ”Freddie”, you were somewhat close. My first association was Sex Pistols‘ God Save the Queen.

There’s definitely some irony that the Queen has already outlived Sid Vicious (the guy on the left). So much for anarchism vs. establishment.

The establishment won! No one can beat Sex Pistols for stupid-looking videos though.

Tags: anarchy, music, punk, queen, streaming, uk, video

anarchy, music, punk, queen, streaming, uk, video

Cases in point: Diablo’s Hellfire expansion and Counter Strike (based on Half-Life engine). CS became so big that eventually the company behind Half-Life bought the team that was working on it. (Blizzard are rumored to work on Diablo 3 for Playstation!)

The question about user-generated content is a closely watched one because it paves the way for an engaging experience at reduced costs to the game developer. In a way, this reflects the fascination with reality TV shows. When the cost for developing a game reaches tens of million, developers are looking for ways to cut costs.

BBC recently aired an interview with Will Wright, the creator of The Sims. He praised user-generated content but readily admitted the vast majority of it was junk. Based on the one-percent rule of contribution, I figure that 99% of the users never created anything anyway. According to Will, 95% of the creations were junk.

That’s some pretty dismal statistics. I believe it was Warren Buffet who said, however, that a cigarette butt found on the street doesn’t offer much but when you consider the price, it’s an amazing deal. Same thing with user-generated content: if it costs you nothing, how can you complain about the quality?

P.S. You can view the BBC interview with Will Wright here (requires Real player).

Tags: 80:20, anarchy, content, contribution, democracy, paretto, web2.0

80:20, anarchy, content, contribution, democracy, paretto, web2.0

I’ve been trying to incentivize people

Out of the millions of visitors to the Wikipedia in June 2005, only 68,682 actually clicked the edit button and contributed in some fashion. There’s core group of about 3,000 editors who make over 100 edits per month.

It all seems downright worrying until you consider the fact that if you want to grow a community, you don’t need to focus on millions. You just focus on your 1%.

The caveat is based on my personal experience with the Wikipedia. I spent a lot of time editing articles in the first month that I found the site. In fact, my first edit was a vandalizing one – I deleted an article, just to see what happens. So the $1,000,000 question is whether the 1% of active contributors are the same people month to month? If it’s a revolving door, then we’ll definitely have a problem catering to the top 1% because they’ll prove rather elusive.

Update: Seth Godin talks about a possible future for Digg based on the 1% rule.

Tags: 80:20, anarchy, content, contribution, democracy, paretto, vidize, web2.0, wiki

80:20, anarchy, content, contribution, democracy, paretto, vidize, web2.0, wiki