Everyone’s favorite new incarnation of the Big Brother phenomenon – Facebook – filed suit against Teachbook, an social media community catering to teachers.

Here are the deets from Mashable:

The lawsuit argues that Teachbook’s use of “book” dilutes the Facebook (Facebook) brand name, impairs Facebook’s ability to remain unique and creates the facade of a false relationship between the two social networking entities.

While Facebook does not own the rights to the word “book” in all its forms, the company believes its name trademark applies to the word “book” when used in connection with a website of similar purpose
While most would never confuse Teachbook as as a subsidiary or affiliate of Facebook, the suit alleges that Teachbook is attempting to profit by the Facebook name. The suit is also likely designed to help Facebook set a legal precedent for future cases(emphasis mine).

Let’s first note that Facebook the Site did not invent the term “Facebook”. While admittedly, when anyone says “Facebook” today, it means the Great Mothership of our Social Media Lives, it’s not as if Mr. Zuckerberg invented the term Facebook – I clearly remember being a freshman in college in 1999, where we were all handed Facebooks – a magazine dedicated to pictures of every incoming student in alphabetical order. As Facebook the Site was started from Harvard to serve current college students and their friends, the use of the term makes sense.

Most of us are aware that Facebook the Site didn’t coin the original phrase – so to turn and sue a social media site that caters to teachers makes Facebook the Site look really, really bad.
Facebook is now just another corporate bully.

More from Mashable:

The lawsuit decrees that, “If others could freely use ‘generic plus BOOK’ marks for online networking services targeted to that particular generic category of individuals, the suffix BOOK could become a generic term for ‘online community/networking services’ or ’social networking services’.”

That’s how it should be – and Facebook should be proud that it’s social media service has been so well-crafted that it’s “Book”-ness means “Social media” to people. The term Facebook started simple, was adapted into a trail-blazing social media website, and now is the defacto term in our collective consciousness of what a social media experience should be.

However, Facebook has decided that protecting its brand now involves suing niche websites that services teachers, for Christ’s sake – a group that everyone loves to love. And with how uncomfortable current users are with how in-bed Facebook is with corporations, this’ll further sully the image Facebook has to its users. While some may begrudge how our lives are so intertwined with Facebook that now it’s impossible to get out, most of us still love/adore Facebook when its services are useful to us. But Facebook is only as big as its user base, and they really should consider how their lawsuit to “protect their brand” is really just hurting it.

Besides, the public don’t usually side with the people who are against Teachers. It’s just a bad target, people.

*Picture from Ideagrove.

Quick recap:

• Target donates $150K to the campaign for Minnesota Republican gubernatorial candidate Tom Emmer, who is against same-sex marriage.
• Target’s liberal consumer base, who in 2008 was profiled as “independent-minded, style-conscious, cost-conscious suburbanite” (read: Gays and the cool heteros that like them), called for a Boycott throughout the social media sphere.

The Facebook Page for the boycott has already won near 70,000 likes in the 3 weeks it’s been up. They are also smart enough to spread simple images that get their message across, like this gem:

Here’s where things get really interesting, because its not just Target that’s affected, it is now any business that is associating with Target at this time:

Via Queerty:

Already facing the wrath of America's gays, the retailer's disease is spreading to other companies teaming up with it. Just this week we saw protesters outside Andre Balzas' Standard Hotel in New York City, which was hosting Target's "kaleidoscope" fall fashion preview, furious over the corporate dollars flowing to Minnesota gubernatorial candidate Tom Emmer. Now they're sinking their fangs into the designer sale site Gilt.

Gilt Group, which runs "members-only" (i.e. enter your email address to sign up) sales that help designers unload inventory, offered a pop-up Target sale that promises "early and exclusive sneak-peek access to three exciting new Target collaborations with the likes of Tucker, Mulberry and John Derian." It also invited the wrath of those furious with Target to unload on its Facebook page.

The Target Boycott/Protest has gone viral, people.

The transparency of the internet means that people can not only catch onto these sorts of business deals/connections, but to also have the tools to spread this message and fast. We’ve seen how social media has changed the face of protests in other countries, like last year’s protests in Moldova.

This is further interesting in the light of the controversial decision by the Supreme Court that eliminated donation limits from corporations that directly donate to the politicians of their choosing. Or, letting corporations buy off more elections that’ll work for their corporate interests. People decried this loss of democratic power, with corporations being more able to influence elections in their favor (as opposed to the people’s favor).

However, now we see the consequences of when corporations donate to politicians that DON’T serve the need of their customers. How safe will companies feel to donate to controversial politicians (yes, both left and right), if their customers now have the power to cripple them?

I haven’t seen any official news on how the boycott is affecting Target, but I eagerly await to see if this is hitting Target hard enough to make a difference.

However, how Facebook is marketing their stab at geo-location takes a different tack.

“Serendipitous” is used quite a bit, and the whole video seems smeared with a layer of bromantic Vaseline. The use of emotion and connections is both cheesy, yet strong – and the instant access to your friends circle definitely beats Foursquare. Afterall, my Foursquare account still lists only like 5 friends – now all 170 of my friends’ activities are at my fingertips.

I’m more interested to see how Foursquare and Gowalla will respond to Facebook finally entering the geo-location ring – I expect intriguing new features that’ll raise its status above Facebook. Or otherwise it might blow away like a tumbleweed within a year.

UPDATE: Or maybe I’m just a super-wrong douchebag. Mashable reports that the day after FB Places launched, Foursquare had the most new users sign up, breaking their own records.

According to a tweet from Foursquare CEO Dennis Crowley, the company had its “biggest day ever” for signups of new users on Thursday. The surge in signups was probably due to the countless comparisons people are making between Facebook Places and Foursquare. With heightened media and user interest, it’s no wonder people are signing up to find out what this location thing is all about.

Record signups doesn’t mean the company’s in the clear, though. As the weeks and months pass and Places establishes itself as a service, we’ll get a better picture of whether Foursquare can fend off Facebook’s advances and continue its rapid growth.

Full Mashable Post here.

Between the losing fortunes of Windows Mobile in the past decade (23% market share in 2004, 7.9% market share in 2009), and the hilarious failure that was the Microsoft KIN (less than 10,000 sold before it was killed 6 weeks after launch) , the upcoming Windows Phone 7 is Microsoft’s last chance in the mobile wars.

Thankfully, Microsoft is playing smart, and taking the best options available on other mobile platforms. The new biggie is Video Games:

A grand total of 63 games have been announced today, and more will be available by the device’s holiday season launch. The games include well-known titles such as Castlevania and Guitar Hero, classically inspired numbers such as Frogger, casual games that include Bejeweled and many more.

Read the rest of the post at Gizmodo.

At this point, what helps keep the iPhone (and iPod Touch) the top of the mobile mountain is Apps. but to me, super geek boy, its App Games. I bought an iPod Touch because I wanted all the gaming/app experience of the iPhone, but without the ridiculousness of AT&T. Since WP7 will be run across a variety of cell providers, more people will hopefully embrace WP7 as their new smartphone.

It’s gotta be better than the Android phones. I have a Droid Eris, and I hate the buggy fucker.

Comic Con has turned into a most important event during the entertainment-marketing year, where the creators, the producers, and marketers come to show their upcoming TV/movie wares. As social media has dominated, so have geek voices been the most visible on what flicks are worth seeing. And, if enough of the Comic Con geeks talk about your show, then better chances of people watching it.

Here’s a snippet from a great article by Liz about the commercialization, and search of fan authenticity, at this year’s Comic-Con over at LA Weekly:

In the past decade, in the eyes of the studios, the geeks have become the cool crowd. Spider-Man and Batman films were box-office gold. Battlestar Galactica was rebooted and became a critical and ratings success. Star Wars parodies popped up everywhere, from Internet memes to shows like Family Guy and Robot Chicken. The people who were once (and, sometimes, still) derided for wearing superhero T-shirts and being well-versed in the Star Wars extended universe are now a major marketing target.

Geek respect, once earned, can be heard to lose. There is a sense of loyalty to geeks – even if we hate the New Trilogy, Mr. George Lucas, there is still a part of us that rejoices at the thought of Darth Vader.

When the geeks seem to drop their support of media properties once worshiped, it can be shocking. And mostly hilarious.

Case in Point – Friday night Premiere of the Scott Pilgrim movie [No spoilers]
Filled with geeks, who would be in cosplay if the outfits from the Scott Pilgrim movie weren’t essentially the same things the would-be cosplayer would be wearing in their daily lives. The trailers are filled with the flashy flicks, the horror fests, etc. But then this juicy trailer started up, and we got up in stitches.

Plot:
So, 6 people get trapped in an elevator. And then the lights go out, people start getting cut, and apparently either just a serial killer or possibly Satan (no joke) is trapped in the elevator with them.

And I think the numbers 666 are really important. It’s that cliched.

It looks just awful. Everyone else agreed with me, because when the trailer proudly displayed:

From the Mind of M. Night Shyamalan

Everyone burst out laughing when his name hit the screen. A true camp joy to witness.

Shyamalan, you had us geeks once. Sixth Sense was pretty good, but Unbreakable, with his beautiful treatment of the superhero narrative is what really won us over. I think most of us were still with him with his “strong aliens except when water’s involved” movie Signs. Then all of a sudden there’s a chick in a swimming pool and his movies keep slipping from my memory, and a few years down the line, the geeks have turned on him. Even if he hasn’t lost them all (and he hasn’t), a lot of geeks just aren’t into him anymore.

It just all feels so tired and plain. An elevator horror movie? The Japanese can pull it off sometimes, but it just comes out as so campy/bad to the Western audience.

M Night, it was great while it lasted.

Last week, the smart fellows at Jumptap hosted The Mobile Upfront – an all-day event that brought together the top people working in mobile phone advertising. The army of panelists talked about the State of the Mobile Movement – the mistakes ad agencies make, and predictions on how mobile will further change the already chaotic media scene.

The Mobile Upfront was 10 days ago, so I realize in regards to the Speed of t eh Netz, this blog post is a total dinosaur. Please allow me, this humble plesiosaur, to talk about some of the things discussed that day.

And lo, A Bushy-haired Man Will Show Us The Way

Bob Greenberg, Visionary Leader (or as I think of it, The Great Seer) at R/GA, started the day off with a 1-on-1 interview on all things mobile. Crammed into that half hour were many tasty gems of mobile knowledge, which I shall impart to you (like the good disciple that I am).

-Greenberg Prediction One: Mobile Will Become The 1st Screen

Most advertisers work off a hierarchy of screen importance:

TV = 1st screen – the most important, most far reach touchpoint
Desktop/Laptop = The 2nd Screen
Mobile Screen = 3rd Screen

Greenberg points out that the coming of 4G Networks (broadband speed on phones!), streaming mobile video will take off. GPS and geo-location will become increasingly used on a daily basis. Better voice recognition means voice search, armed with the possibility of your phone becoming truly a Personal Assistant, and further become a Personalized Entertainment Device. Thus, we see how the smartphone can evolve to become the 1st Screen.

Not quite covered by Greenberg, but discussed throughout the day:
The other effect of people becoming increasingly attached to their mobile screen (much more than now, when a large amount of people already sleep with their iPhones next to their pillows), is that the smartphone becomes a very private, personal screen.

It’s not like a TV, which is meant for groups of people to partake in (even if one watches TV “alone”, its still an experience potentially shared by millions).

The mobile device is becoming a utilitarian, and entertainment, device. As the mobile user customizes and personalizes his smartphone to run all the things she is interested in. A device that can be intrinsically in-tune with its owner. Of course, this is another step in humanity turning into cyborgs, which I support wholeheartedly.

However, that phone also holds a cache of very valuable data on the owner – which marketers would love to have access to. But if marketers do get access to that data, how can we use it without creeping out the owner?

Already, I can foretell people being creeped out by overly-pushy geo-location advertising. When I had a cellphone in Tokyo, I would get spam emails on my phone about 3 times a week. For whatever reason, I always felt more creepy about spam hitting my phone, instead of my computer. Because it’s my phone. If marketers started pushing (read: interruptive advertising) more into my mobile phone space because of what they have learned about me, then I very well might feel violated.

Thus, when pursuing mobile marketing ideas, we need to make sure we think about and respect the privacy of the mobile user. Nothing revokes trust/loyalty faster than not respecting the privacy of the person.

As far as I can tell, this was made at this specific Jersey dealership – all in-house. Some might see it as hokey, but I see it as charming and effective.

Effective – because it is a great compliment to know that you, as a Volkswagon driver, will be so respected by the robots who will eventually take over the world, that they will be spared. Indeed! The intelligence of VW drivers can match the robots.

For the geeks in their 20s and 30s, this is a high compliment. I WANT to prove the robots right.

(if only I was in any way in the market for a car…)

What I love about this, is that I could have done this with my paltry 40 hours of Flash classes. You can tell they just used some VW stock footage, coupled it with an old-school Screen-Title announcing their dealership, and bam. Done. On the super cheap. Marketed to people only in the Jersey area via Youtube.

I expect to see more cheap, ultra-local efforts like these. I hope they are more fun and quirky and less the dude singing about his furniture store.

(Don’t get me wrong, I still want to marry this dude. Our Gaybies will form a glee choir)

Wal-Mart is pushing their well-designed, good quality generic brands. Thus, the Name Brands of America panic, the hallways of their offices filled with the screeching stampeding of a workforce coddled into thinking the consumer masses will buy your name brand as long as there is a fun graphic or commercial on the air about it.

I guess you can’t rely on 50+ years of consumer/company history to keep consumer loyalty. My, aren’t us consumers just fucking ungrateful to Nabisco and company.

National Name Brands once stood for quality – the idea that, each box would be the same as the last. It was helped that most generic competitors just looked a good deal crappier than the Name Brands there were trying to clone. No, no Silver Shark crackers for my family, thank you!

Then came the Recession, and us consumers are telling the pollsters that we aren’t really planning to come back to the Name Brands once things get sunnier.

Essentially, people are recognizing that the extra 50 cents we’ve spent for the name brands, is just 50 cents of marketing. If the cheaper generics can offer an equally pleasing package, witha product that makes you want to NOM NOM through the whole bag anyway, then one has no reason to support the name brands.

In this atmosphere, here I come, trying to break into the advertising game. I have the challenge of working with a smarter, savvier consumer to convince them that they should drop those 50 cents. Afterall, If that 50 cents is marketing, then I better do a good job of it.

What the Name Brands can do, and a select few are doing, is giving consumers Utility.

Kraft is my Big White Knight, because:

-Their website, Kraftfoods.com, isn’t just a company page listing their products – it’s a deep den of recipes.

-The iFood Assistant App. A couple of bucks and you have hundreds of recipes at your thumb-tip. Stumped at the Supermarket of what to make for dinner that night? Give the iFood Assistant 2 minutes of your time, and you have a recipe and a shopping list all ready to go. For the working mum on a budget, this is highly useful.

Here is Mark Stewart, the VP of Global Media at Kraft, says it best in 3 minutes on this Advertising Age Video.

Companies who give value to their customers will keep buying their products. Make us appreciate you and love you.

This makes my job a lot less about writing witty headlines, and a lot more trying to best serve a consumer’s needs. And if I’m lucky (read: good enough) they’ll buy my brand.

I’ve… got a lot of work to do.

PC World has this interesting tidbit:

“A tectonic shift has taken place for the digital age: ad rates for popular shows like The Simpsons and CSI are higher online than they are on prime-time TV. If a company wants to run ads alongside an episode of The Simpsons on Hulu or TV.com it will cost the advertiser about $60 per thousand viewers, according to Bloomberg. On prime-time TV that same ad will cost somewhere between $20 and $40 per thousand viewers.”

Which makes me wonder why the companies who hold highly syndicated properties (Simpsons obviously, but also shows like Seinfeld, Friends, et al) haven’t been rushing to host their episodes on the internet – and hopefully, with this PC World report – they will.

The magic of these favorite shows is that certain moments live in our head – and when we think “Man, I’d love to see the Radioactive Man movie episode again”, thanks to the internet, we now can

As it is, me and the boyfriend, whenever we have the craving for Simpsons, we don’t turn on the local TV – we go to Watch The Simpsons Online – a fan effort that hosts most every Simpsons episode ever made. Free and immediate, any episode we want to watch, we can. Oh, how digital media spoils us!

The massive syndication of The Simpsons on regular TV since the mid 90s onward have resulted in us being very used to seeing Simpsons almost whenever we want. So we’re not necessarily going to go out and buy the DVD sets – but, put HQ versions on the net with commercials? Yeah, I think most of us will totally do that.

Regarding the Simpsons specifically, its sad that Fox isn’t more aggressive in putting these shows online. Hulu.com is only hosting 5 full-length episodes currently.

As usual, the fans have beat them to the punch, and people can now watch the episodes free online, without any commercials. Media companies need to get their heads out of their asses and embrace on-demand internet video – for if you give us free content EASILY, we shall embrace your advertisements. Let me watch The Rear Window parody on the Simpsons, and I’ll probably buy your shampoo, too.

“Summer is the season to re-read Harry Potter”, as I like to sardonically imagine, but I also stumbled upon this awesome gem

The Aum Shinrikyo Cult gained notoriety when they executed a sarin gas attack, in the Tokyo subway system back in 95. Haruki Murakami interviewed tons of victims from that attack a few years ago.

This book, however, goes into interviewing members of the Cult. In a broader sense, Lifton is trying to break down what drives people in general to such strong Fundamentalist urgings. What’s fascinating is that a lot of what motivates people to join up with these more extreme forms of religion, are really not that much different as the reasons most people subscribe to the specific subcultures that they do. Geek. Punk. Queercore. The power of small worlds/scenes, where your actions seem to have impact and merit.

Then I keep running all this around in my head this weekend, and think “Well, how can I apply this to advertising?” Thus sealing my fate as a sell-out for all eternity.

Anyway, this is all to say that this has been terribly interesting summer reading, even if that admits a fascination with such things as Contemporary Apocalypse Cults. Not that I have any sort of sanctified legs to stand on – considering I spent Saturday night seeing fag punk band Pansy Division rip apart a Bible on stage while singing about blowjobs. Considering I’m going into advertising, I suppose that I am exactly that which Good Christians fear.

Who knew it could come in a package quite so cute as this?