I’ve created a version from the W5 twitter feed and it’s an easy way to browse all the stuff I miss during the day.

If you’re still questioning reality like the rest of us then we’d like to share a nice visual piece of sanity with you via this amazing Inception infographic. (SPOILER ALERT! This graphic contains vital plot details.)

Giggles ensued as each woman talked about her “ideal” man. All this before Mustafa and Iain Tait teamed up to do a perfect storm of viral marketing. The 48-hour weekend campaign featured the sultry-voiced, smooth-muscled Mustafa’s filmed responses to a slew of people who posted comments or questions to the Old Spice spokesman online (notable responses are to celebrities Ellen DeGeneres, Rose McGowan, and political correspondent George Stephanopoulous). Clearly, Wieden+Kennedy hit a home run with their extended campaign, pulling off the social media marketing event of the year. The original commercial was nominated for a Grand Prix award and the latest installment of YouTube videos should stick with the internet community for a long time and in many manifestations.

More importantly, Wieden+Kennedy may have found the secret to actually selling body wash to men through catering to the eyes and ears of women. For most dudes, body wash is not an inherently cool thing to purchase nor is it top of mind in the store. Guys are known to lather up with any bar, chunk, or semblance of soap hanging out in the shower, leaving appalled women everywhere to search for, long for, and even lust after a character like the Old Spice man played to perfection by the brawny Mustafa. While AXE commercials use bathroom humor and Playboy-style sex appeal to reach their target demographic, the sleepy Old Spice of your grandfather’s generation has wised up and reached out to the holder of the purse strings, the man, man’s woman. Only time will tell the result of Old Spice’s hot new man’s impact on overall sales, currently Red Zone body wash sales have dipped. But hey, it can take awhile to wake a septuagenarian up.

Several reviews have been written about Prezi from different standpoints, the business model standpoint being from the Harvard Business Review and the technology standpoint being from the New York Times. In addition to these, from a marketing standpoint, Prezi has significantly changed the face of typical idea-sharing. The interface allows the presenter to engage the audience with an interactive story instead of simply clicking and advancing from one thought to the next. The organic platform lends itself to being more visual in nature; therefore it has more appeal and retains attention longer. Prezi creators took into account the new creative “big picture” mindset of professionals, stating that they learn from culture first, and then react by using technology. Overall, this program is well worth the fee if any business professional wishes to set their ideas apart from the crowd in the newest, most creative way.

1. an oceanographer
2. a chemist
3. a marine engineer
4. and at least one expert on the problem

(yeah, might need at least one of each of these…)

but a group of Dutch architects and engineers has started up a research project to explore the idea of creating a sustainable island nation out of the trash floating in the Pacific.  The project has been heralded “Recycled Island,” and the goal is a livable and scalable habitation the size of Hawaii’s big island.

The early mock-ups bring Venice,  Dubai,  and science fiction to mind, but the project is still very much in the early R&D stages and far from a reality.  People love Dutch design for architecture and urban planning, not to mention their credibility in environmental solutions, so despite the distance from the potential island, this idea has sparked in the Netherlands.  And why not beckon the world’s greatest minds through online publishing and networking? The project has been spreading across magazine websites,  blogs, and press releases this week (I saw it here), and the group networks through Facebook to various other sustainable design groups.

Some virtual ships, machines, and robots and things building Recycled Island in Waterworld, er, the Pacific

Interestingly, the app is not intended to serve as a digital form of the magazine, but as a new way for consumers to engage with the brand. Given Gourmet’s dedicated following and the widespread disappointment with the magazine’s cancellation, repackaging the magazine in the form of an app appears to be a brilliant move. Not only will the app reintroduce a trusted brand in an entirely new way, it will fill the void for dedicated readers who have yet to find a satisfactory substitute. In addition, the app well help the brand reach a younger, tech-savvy audience. The trick will be keeping the content fresh enough to attract new readers and familiar enough to satisfy older fans. With Gourmet’s culinary legendary expertise and reputation, balancing old tastes with new textures should be as easy as cooking “Easy Seafood Paella“.

First, Kevin Durant of the Oklahoma City Thunder avoids the spotlight in signing an extension to remain with the smallest market NBA team. Heannounces his new deal via Twitter.  The second example is Mariano Rivera becoming a model for Canali. Both have gone about their brands in an understated way, allowing their play on the field to be the most vocal aspect of their brands.  While neither is matching LeBron in terms of outside endorsements, they’re not getting the venom of late.

In the past week, LeBron has gone from a likable athlete to being described as the villain.  Why?  Because he’s made it less and less about winning and more and more about his brand. Brand building and promotion are fine, but if you don’t do your job (in Lebron’s case win championships) there’s a backlash. He’s now in a position where he will have a hard time repairing his image. If he goes to Miami, he’ll be expected to win every year. If he goes to New York, New Jersey, or Chicago he’ll be seen as jilting poor Cleveland and chasing money. If he stays in Cleveland people will call him an ego maniac who just wanted to world to watch him for a while. Whatever happens, the expectations for King James may be unattainable.

The best thing a brand can do? Let the quality of your product do the talking and promote that.

Here is an example:

The diagram works by clustering words with similar meanings in an interconnected web. A central word is used as the foundation with words closest in meaning surrounding the central word. As the web moves outward, the words become less similar in meaning to the central word, providing a spatial allocation for word relationships. Auditory working memory mainly takes place in the confines of the brain, but the Visual Thesaurus illustrates that “memory web” in a profound and useful way.

It’s almost complete, after 45 years, it’s almost there. A dozen surviving researchers are wrapping things up, puting the final touches on “Slab-Z, ” the fifth and final volume of a series first published in 1975 by Harvard University Press is scheduled to be completed next year.

DARE, “The Dictionary of American Regional English,” is finally closing in on completing what has to be the coolest thing I’ve heard about in the last few years: completely documenting America’s geographically variant vocabulary. All of it. The regional patois that communicates the great American quilt. 

I’m not even going to start to go into examples, I couldn’t even begin to do it justice, you get the gist. What’s so great about it is the documentation of variant words and phrases not found in normal dictionaries that we all, no matter where we live, use with our neighbors without thinking. And if we we’re born somewhere else other than our current domicile, oh how we all easily slip into our common threads when we return ‘home’.

Tom Wolfe calls DARE his “favorite reading.” I gotta get this (that’s right, it’s only in hard copy), but I’m not even sure where to start…

Goldenberg believes that laggards tend to ‘leapfrog’ over generations of technology. In essence, let’s say that while laggards may have shied away from buying an iPod, they would be first in line to buy the iTouch.  Given the group’s fairly broad base, it would be foolish not to target their buying power.  Goldenberg’s study led him to conclude that if a mere 10% of the group leapfrogs to a particular new gadget, their purchases could drive sale profits up by 89% – which may prove the “difference between succeeding and not succeeding,” as he puts it.

The argument is logically viable, so let’s assume his findings are accurate.  How does one toggle between messages speaking to savvy adopters and resistant laggards? Purchase motivations for the two groups, while not necessarily mutually exclusive, are disparate enough to warrant unique marketing strategies: adopters want a revolution; laggards, a tried-and-true evolution.  Capturing both types of consumers will require a firm understanding of how aspects of your products can be framed in such a way as to meet one group’s needs, without alienating the other.