Paper.Li Looks Good on Paper, but…

I’ve recently been added to a few Paper.li posts. I’d heard of Paper.li but hadn’t used it. I’ve seen quite a proliferation of Tweets like “The Joe Smith Daily is out” that leads to Joe Smith’s Paper.li page. For those who haven’t seen it, Paper.li allows users to collect their favorite content, text, tweets, images, video, etc. into a single page that can be seen by anyone they send a link to. On the surface this seems like a great idea. Kind of like Alltop meets Delicious, meets blogs. Looking a little closer gave me some cause for concern.

When I post a tweet that quotes a source, references a study, links to a story written by someone else, I’m making no revenue. I’m sharing information that I found interesting for free. Most sites encourage this, after all the more people that I tell, the more visitors they get, the more ads they sell.

If I have ads on my blog, and I write all of my own content, I’m perfectly justified in collecting revenue from ads. I’m providing something of value to my visitors, they are giving back by looking at the ads on my site (or not, I don’t particularly believe in the power of display ads), and the advertisers are receiving the chance to generate a lead or spread awareness in exchange for paying me to continue to write content to attract visitors. This is the same model that newspapers introduced in the 1700s, that both radio and television continued.

Now, if I  reposted, say, a New York Times article on my blog, even if I provided a link back to the original, I’d be interfering with their revenue. If I surrounded that article with ads, I’d be offering someone else’s content and getting paid for their hard work. This is my problem with Paper.li.

My tweets, links, and other content, along with that of other folks I know like CC Chapman, Jim Spencer, Edward Boches, Steve Garfield, etc. are being aggregated into a Paper.li user’s post. This in itself is not a bad thing. After all, the farther our content is spread, the more people can gain value from it. Those that click through the links are more traffic for all of the sites where the content is originally published, which means more revenue. The problem is, Paper.li pages serve ads. This means that whether it’s a video, a tweet, or a link to a New York Times article, Paper.li is making money from it. I’m sure the folks at the New York Times and other publications, or content creators don’t feel great about this.

On one hand I understand the draw a single place for a user to share info they find valuable. The issue is, can these sites use content without the creators’ permission to make money? Paper.li is not alone, Digg and other similar sites are doing the same thing. If I used it for personal use only, a dashboard only I saw, I could see appropriateness of advertising, to get paid for providing me with a content dashboard. But the fact that it is outward facing changes the dynamic. Personally I’m a bit concerned that content publishers may take away their sharing features, if they think others are making money from their content.

I’m curious what other content creators, publishers, or just information sharers think about this?

CNN had similar thoughts on Content Farms, while they don’t mention Paper.li, they agree that this kind of link baiting is one of the Top 10 Tech Fails of 2010

BMW Shoots Viral Piece, Does it Hit or Miss?

Earlier this year BMW launched a viral video to promote the launch of it’s new model in the U.S. The video was released as a documentary following the stories of a small Bavarian town named Oberpfaffelbachen. The town’s citizens include a stunt driver, over zealous police chief, event promoter and mayor, trying to save the town from hard financial times. They devise a promotion in which they will launch a 300 horse power BMW 1 Series from a 454 meter (1486.5 feet) ramp from Bavaria, across the Atlantic to the U.S. The town has created an entire festival around the event called Rampenfest. Towns folk are turning their houses into gift shops, town managers are tearing down forests for parking. I won’t give away the ending, but obviously something goes wrong. Not as dramatically as I’d hoped unfortunately.

The quality of the video is excellent, the acting, direction and effects (as subtle as the ramp, as obvious as the teeth) as good as a movie. The video has been seen by millions which can give BMW the opportunity to claim a positive impact, especially considering that it was shot overseas and cost far less than a U.S. 30 second spot. Was it successful? It’s hard to say.

As with any viral, guerilla or virtual advertising, it is hard to judge success. Many still talk about the negative impact of the Aqua Teen Hunger Force guerilla stunt, requiring a payout of 2 million to the city of Boston to cover lawsuits and the cost of our crack bomb squad (who apparently can’t tell the difference between a bomb and a light brite!). The press loves to bring up the GM (Chevy) Yukon promotion run on YouTube. Many people made anti-SUV ads from the audio and video clips GM posted in the make-you-own commercial promotion. This brings us to what determines success.

The GM promotion was considered a failure because of the thousands of ads that were created that shed a positive light on the Yukon, there were a few that were negative. But, is that a bad thing? Most people learn by making mistakes or being told they’re wrong. Negative feedback is just as important, if not more important than positive feedback. How will you know how to improve your product unless people tell you what they DON’T like about it? GM learned that there are alot of people that consider their giant SUV bad for the environment and a gas guzzler. If this prompts them to make eco-friendly, gas-conscious improvements to their vehicles, is that a bad thing for the company or the consumer?

And let’s not forget that with the launch of the BMW campaign, the GM promotion was brought up as a failure again. Really? The Chevy Yukon is mentioned in the press for another car manufacturer’s promotion and that’s a bad thing? Sounds like free press to me. Even when a guerilla or viral campaign can’t be measured in sales or doesn’t have quite the immediate impact a company would hope, there is always the fact that it will continue to keep the brand in the public’s conscience for months and years to come.

Brand visibility is the best way to consider whether or not your viral or guerilla campaign is effective. You can’t often track sales back to a campaign like this or even sign-ups. You may get a solid number of visits to your microsite, but when visitors pull down your video, or assets, or talk about it in their blog, it can be difficult to track especially since those co-opted branding placements end up living for months out of your control.

So, how successful will the BMW campaign be? Well, they millions of viewers at the moment. Add on a few million views of the video once people (like me) download the clip to their iPod/iPhone and show it around, upload it to their YouTube, MySpace, Facebook or blog accounts, hundreds of discussions of it in marketing or news related blogs (where I found it) and then it’s recurring mention every time another automaker or major corporation does a viral or guerilla campaign and it sounds like a success to me.

But BMW knows this. They were arguably one of the first to use viral video not just as a tool to sell cars but a way to engage consumers with their brand, and to redefine their brand as cool. I still have a DVD copy of the BMW Movies from the promotion in 2001. The shorts were directed by Ang Lee, Guy Ritchie, John Woo, Tony Scott, John Frankenheimer and featured Forest Whitakker, Madonna, Clive Owen, Mickey Rourke and others. It received rave reviews at Cannes, from the New York Times, and Time magazine. They very successfully hit their middle-age, married, 150k/yr target.

The new spot however, at least in the words of Marketing VP Jack Pitney, was, rather than target a demographic, to target a psychographic. While most companies want to stick to categorizing their demographics by generation, age and finances, BMW is smart enough to know that they can pull an 8 year old boy and an 58 year old woman into their brand halo just by virtue of the fact that they may share common interests, like flashy cars, or mockumentaries.

Despite my feeling that this viral video may be a bit long for most viewers (35 minutes), I’m fairly certain that the folks at BMW will be pleased with the outcome. And I’m happy to help them broadcast their brand (even though I drive the “other” german car)!

Links:
Official Film Site

BMW Films Wikipedia

BMW Films Site (no videos here)

BMW Film “Star” (you can find the rest of the films here as well)

Digg submission where I first found out about the promotion