I’m going to have to apologize for what is going to seem like a non sequitur in the midst of Paul’s BP posts, but I ran into this the other day and I wanted to seem timely.

A while back, we posted a Twitter taxonomy which included the bot, “a character that spams non-original content as part of a larger kind of humorous or pithy zeitgeist”. Excuse of the Day is one example. But what about a character played by a person to similar effect?

The Mars Phoenix probe was the first one of these I followed, so although another name might be more appropriate, I'm going to stick with calling them bots. Phoenix was notable because instead of a quote-a-day it was used as a marketing/ educational tool of sorts. The probe would give updates on itself and answer questions. The gesture of Twittering gave what could have been a dry scientific mission some personality.

Until the mission ended, the identity of @MarsPhoenix was not widely known. I’m glad that they did this as it kept some of the magic alive. If you didn’t know who it was, then it might as well be from a robot on Mars. It was understood, however, that the Tweets were coming from someone at official at NASA. When you’re marketing something, accountability is important.

But what if you are marketing for someone, presumably as them, and they don’t know about it? That’s what happened over the summer as a group of fans pretended to be the characters of Mad Men on Twitter, without the okay from AMC.

On the web, anyone can be Don Draper, but should they?
Image from SNL short: Don Draper's Guide to Picking Up Women.

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This is story about crisps.

Crisps, for non-Anglophiles, are a highly popular British foodstuff similar to American chips. Our flavors seem downright boring when compared to the likes of sausage & ketchup, prawn cocktail, lamb & mint, and Mature Cheddar with Adnams Broadside Beer.

Like most processed food, the size of crisps has shrunk of late. That’s what makes this gesture by crisp-maker Monster Munch so great. Their new version is going back to the old, bigger size.

New Old! Bigger like they used to be.

Ad Blogger Iain Tait writes:

What’s so clever about this is that they’ve tapped into a conversation that’s been going on for decades amongst crisp fanciers. Everyone knows that the old Monster Munch were bigger. They were ‘the biggest snack pennies can buy’. And they had really cool big monsters advertising them. It’s the kind of thing that pops up in those terrible ‘50 reasons why things aren’t as good as they used to be’ nostalgiawank TV shows.

Anyway they’ve made them like they used to be again.

We talk a lot about less around here, but for good things, more is simply better. And as John Maeda says “More is More”.

I think we'd all like to see a little More these days.

Caveats

Now, we’ve all got way too many tools in our lives—software, email, and now things like Twitter and delicious, so this may seem like a whole lot more from a couple of guys who proclaim the virtue of less. I’ll try to counter that by saying these are “little” tools: simple, one-shot smart bombs for solving specific problems -- nothing new to learn, no lifelong commitments to maintenance. (Alton Brown would probably shoot me for pitching unitaskers, but, whatever. Software is different.)

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Geeks don't take holidays. Despite the fact that yesterday was Labor Day, the internet buzzed with the news that Google was soon to release its own browser, Chrome. Everyone knew this because Google mailed a press release --in the form of a comic book-- over the weekend.

Some blogs seemed to get a chuckle out of the gesture ("No Joke: Google Introduces the Chrome Browser with a Cartoon"), but I think Google played this one well.

McCloud's visual style is clean and minimal, just how we like it. Moreover, he uses Google employees as protagonists to give it that "pretty bird" appeal.

First off, who better to make the comic than Scott McCloud himself? The man literally wrote the book on comics as visual communication. He takes what could have easily been a rather dull presentation and makes it lively and accessible.

But accessible to whom? Who is the audience for this comic? There are some topics, like process management, that seem geared towards the technical crowd. But then what developer needs to have open source explained to them?

Perhaps Google believes that its users --not just its developers-- should know these details about the software and its politics. Maybe your dad should know how plugin security works. If the new browser is to succeed, Google needs to appeal to more than just surface features (i.e. chrome).

It shows a lot of respect for the audience to actually try to teach them something rather than try to gloss over it with buzzwords or fancy effects. If Google can educate its audience about what is important in a browser, it will make them critical consumers.

If users are smarter because of their efforts, it raises the bar for everyone who makes a browser-- which, presumably, puts Google in a good position. In that sense, the comic is a form of pedagogical marketing.

Vista has problems. Paul doesn’t like it; Apple grabs market share while making fun of it. So what does Microsoft do? Fight back with science!

Microsoft recently conducted its own study where they showed users a new Windows operating system called “Mojave”. Subjects reported that they liked the new OS better than their current one (presumably XP). The catch is that it wasn’t a new operating system, it was Vista.

It reminds me of when the tobacco industry published its own research back in the 50’s. Suspicious? You bet.

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