Michael Leis

Reviewing a pr firm’s social campaign pitch for a client, and it is sound as a pound: Influential bloggers in the category write stories with comment giveaways Influencer Satellite Media Tour interviews (like an interview on Today) Facebook application with badges for people to post on their timeline Marketplace and sponsored stories ad buys And [...]

After concluding another blur of a sxsw and nursing a sore throat (par for the course), a few overall notes on this year’s annual gathering in Austin:

Now, I just became acquainted with epic mealtime a few minutes ago, but this panel seems interesting, talking about how a few friends became massive Internet food celebrities: taking large quantities of fast food and creating massive dishes, which then they demonstrate eating these monstrosities. Why has epic mealtime been so successful? Seems because they [...]

After a rain-drenched morning, and a faster than expected registration line, I find myself with a decent seat for hearing more about how people will use technology to explore indoor spaces. This is an interesting topic because societies love of large structures remains largely untouched by technology specific to that physical space. You can post [...]

Got to see an excellent talk this weekend called Facing Up to the Uncanny Valley. If you’re not familiar with the term, it is a feeling of creepyness you get when a computer created person gets between 96% and 99% indistinguishably real. While we can project empathy and emotion on a simpler figure (think stick [...]

More and more I’m getting the feeling brand marketers hold the assumption that when a person clicks “like” on your page or site that it is the equivalent of subscribing to you, like email or Twitter. In reality, it’s a lot like this Flight of the Conchords song:

There’s a real significant possibility that 2012 might be the year people started searching Twitter as their entryway to making decisions instead of Google. There are two reasons why this could actually happen: t.co links and Korea:

What started as an innocent-enough giveaway app on Facebook blew up into a fascinating story of understanding just how important social capital is to people. Here’s how it goes:

Now months removed from the presentation that Brian Reynolds (Zynga’s senior strategist) delivered at sxsw, his main points are still resonant and useful. Here’s what I’ve boiled down, which I hope helps you think differently, critically about what and how you approach your next social effort:

It’s all about the power of innuendo. Yesterday’s memorable SXSW talk, the one that will be ringing in my mind for some time was “The New Frontier of Social Gaming,” delivered by Brian Reynolds from Zynga. What he’s working in is fascinating: the science of people having fun together on the internet.