With its “Give It A Ponder” campaign, the handset maker walks the line between lecture and laughs

LG's viral marketing campaign is using humor to get teens to think before they text. Image: Facebook.

One in five teenagers have received a naked picture in a cell phone message. That's one scary stat that LG marketing executive Ehtisham Rabbani uncovered while researching how teens use mobile technology.

Most interesting, though, is what Rabbani did with the information. Rather than ignore the trend – or engage in a lot of hand wringing about the problems with kids today – he set out to change it. To that end, he and his team built a unique yet risky marketing campaign about bad mobile manners like sending racy pics, bullying and spreading rumors. Called "Give It A Ponder," it embraces YouTube (GOOG) videos and Facebook networks to spread its message virally online, and tries to convince teens to think before they text. More

Living in the post-Visa world

By Roger C. Wood, CEO, ORCA Inc.

Wood: Currency is a-changin'. Photo: ORCA

When I was contemplating moving from the wireless sector to the Web sector, I read just about every column Nick Negroponte wrote as a columnist for WIRED Magazine. His departing piece, entitled “Beyond Digital” was published in December 1998 and served as an inspiration to me. After reading it, I left my role as general manager of the International Division for the consortium of mobile start-ups (Voicestream, Omnipoint, Aerial and Powertel) that became T-Mobile USA  and joined Reebok International to launch the first multi-national interactive division of any Fortune 1000 company, launching e-commerce sites in 36 separate countries. This opinion piece is an ode to that pivotal article.

Nine-year-old Boy #1 – “I like Fusion Fall. It’s kind of a mission game; it’s not like a chatting game. Sometimes I like to play chat, that’s why I like Club Penguin. But now I like Fusion better, mostly it’s just more fun to earn Taros and Nanos and Fusion Matter. I like spending Fusion Matter because I can get more HP and cool clothes. And, it loads my clothes super fast.”

Nine-year-old Boy #2 – “I hate Adventurequest because it’s just an RPG and it looks like no one else is there. I like to earn prestige and HP. I get hurt all the time, so I need to buy HP all the time. I haven’t figured out all of the shopkeepers in Fusion Fall, but there are different types. The power shopkeeper seems like the best.”

“Load my clothes”? “Prestige and HP”? “Power shopkeeper”? If you have no idea what these kids are talking about, welcome to the post-VISA world of virtual currency.  The very nature of basic transactions will be transformed by this generation and this piece of a kid’s conversation is just the beginning.

No matter what you call it – virtual currency, s-commerce, contextual payments, in-apps buying or stored value – young people want to pay for things in little pieces without leaving the entertainment experience. More

Marketing online is about more than jumping on the social media bandwagon

By Sam Cece, CEO, StrongMail Systems.

A decade ago, the term social media didn’t mean much to consumers, let alone marketers and corporate executives.

Cece says platforms change but good marketing principals prevail. Photo: StrongMail

Today, none of us can get away from the term – it’s everywhere. Companies are jumping on the social bandwagon, erecting fan pages on Facebook, developing corporate Twitter accounts, creating groups on LinkedIn and producing channels on YouTube–all in the name of reaching, engaging and influencing customers on a more personal level.

While the game has certainly changed, it feels as if the social media pendulum has swung a bit too far in one direction. But by taking a closer look, it becomes clear that the more things change, the more they stay the same.

Social media isn’t new (email is considered by many to be the first social network), word-of-mouth marketing has been around for decades (look at the way Amway and Mary Kay Cosmetics products are sold) and viral marketing isn’t a fresh idea (arguably the pyramid scheme, which dates back to Charles Ponzi, was fueled by viral marketing). More

To battle back against Facebook, MySpace tunes into more online music

MySpace, the once and would-be king of social media, is increasingly turning

Van Natta's MySpace is doubling down on music. Photo: MySpace

toward music to combat a dominant Facebook, and keep its 125 million users coming back.

On Wednesday in San Francisco at the Web 2.0 Summit, MySpace CEO Owen Van Natta announced the launch of two new music products for the online site – one for the fans, the other for the bands. More

User-generated video goes mobile – and live

Ramu Sunkara was at home in Silicon Valley three years ago, chatting with a friend in Moscow, when inspiration struck. He didn’t just want to hear about his friend

Sunkara: inspired by a Moscow snow frolic. Photo: Qik

playing in the snow with his kids. He wanted to see it, live.

Now he can. Soon after that phone conversation, Sunkara and two friends started Qik (pronounced "quick"), a company whose software lets cell phones broadcast video live to the Internet.

Today, Qik and other mobile video services are still in their infancy. But consumers finally have an excuse to try them, now that they have access to 3G networks and a new crop of video-equipped smartphones. According to Nielsen VideoCensus, Qik has so far attracted just a tiny audience, though its popularity seems to have spiked recently. Since its iPhone app began working over 3G networks in August, viewers have stayed on the site six times longer.

"When we launched, only two phones were capable of doing live video," says Sunkara, Qik's CEO. "Now practically every new phone can."

Cell phone video in general is a fast-growing category. Google (GOOG) says that YouTube's cell phone video uploads increased fivefold just a week after the release of the latest video-capable iPhones (AAPL). Facebook has begun adding video capture to its cell phone apps. And sites like Ustream and Flixwagon are experimenting in the same live mobile video niche where Qik is making a name for itself. More

Think you can create the next Twitter or Facebook? Good luck with that.

Markson: Building an online business has many offline challenges. Photo: Blekko

By Mike Markson, co-founder, Blekko

Many a consumer looks at an “overnight sensation” such as Twitter or Facebook and muses: “That service is so simple — I could do that.”  If only it were true.

It turns out that starting a business on the web is hard.   Very hard.  And I’m not talking about the technology – although that part is hard, too.   I’m talking about the business part: building a user base and finding a way to make money. Those are really hard problems.

Whether you’re a start-up or an established company, here are the hard truths you must face if you want to build a successful online media property.
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The video-sharing site loses money and has failed to attract quality studio programming. So why does Google continue to pump money into it?

YouTube co-founder Chad Hurley (left) and product manager Salar Kamangar

You would think Google's executive triumvirate — CEO Eric Schmidt and co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page — would be worried about YouTube. Almost three years after they forked over $1.65 billion in stock to acquire the video-sharing site, YouTube last year delivered only an estimated $240 million in revenue and is deeply in the red.

YouTube is the largest video platform in the world. Users upload 20 hours of video to it each minute, at tremendous cost to Google (GOOG). The company doesn't break out YouTube's expenses, but analysts believe it spends tens of millions of dollars each month just on network capacity to host all those videos.

And, oh, what videos! Four years after its inception YouTube remains a repository for "long tail" content that appeals to niche audiences: clips of cats on skateboards, babies laughing, and kids lip-synching. (There are occasional mass-audience moments, like the clip of Susan Boyle on Britain's Got Talent, viewed 71 million times.)

Gallery: See YouTube's greatest hits

But despite Google's repeated efforts, YouTube has failed to create an environment for professional video content, where many advertisers are clamoring to put their money right now. More

Howard Dean may be out of a job soon. "The Internet puts people like politicians out of business," said the former chairman of the Democratic National Party and Governor of Vermont. "Our own government is going to get run over by both the private sector and young people organizing over the Net." But politicos aren't completely out of the Internet loop, and Dean offered several examples of election results shaped by new technology. More