Lindsay Lohan Archive

This afternoon I was part of a Entrepreneur Week panel discussing a variety of digital topics. In addition to myself, Darren Herman from The Media Kitchen, Rick Heitzmann, Managing Director at FirstMark Capital, Ross Goldstein, Co-Founder & Managing Director at DFJ Gotham Ventures sat on the panel and moderating panel was handled by Richie Hecker from Boostrapper.

During the panel, we discussed the new crop of social sites and one of the panelists (I forgot which one) mentioned that we are now all celebrities. He continued that not only are we celebrities but we are also paparazzi. I added that there is a difference between celebrities and celebrities. We are going to see more and more celebrities on Twitter in the coming days and months and I thought it was worth differentiating between celebrities and celebrities.

Twitter grew because it made us all into instant celebrities – we have fans (Twitter calls them followers). We like to believe that our fans give a crap about what we do (they don’t). For some, it’s clear that they believe they really are celebrities.

As we watch Britney Spears, Lindsay Lohan, Paris Hilton or the million-follower “punk” say and do things on Twitter (and other Internet tools), it’s easy to think that everything they do online are things that we can also get away with. We can’t. When Britney screws up, it helps her sell future records. When Lindsay screws up, she gets more movie deals. When you or I screw up, it can affect us negatively. More importantly, it can affect us later on down the road as everything we do only travels with us 24×7 in our Internet briefcase.

It’s one thing to want to dress up like a celebrity but to mimic their online behavior could prove to be detrimental to a person’s career for the long-term. It’s bad enough that services like Twitter allow us to be instantly emotional. After the panel concluded, a few attendees mentioned that people they know have shared content online which they thought was private only to learn that other people shared the content outside.

This is the difference between celebrity and celebrity – you can’t get away with it.

Entertainment and gossip news site and TV show TMZ has announced the launch of a mobile site today. That’s right, if you can’t wait to check a browser or watch the show to find what’s going on with the celebrity crowd, you can now get it direct to your handset any time of the day! Watch the worker productivity go straight up ya’all! TMZ is part of AOL.

Quattro Wireless is handling the development and deployment of the WAP/Mobile site available on any wireless carrier in the U.S. The site will be ad supported and the initial sponsor is the producers of the movie, "Walk Hard". TMZ can sell advertiser packages across tv, web and mobile making for a very leveraged buying opportunity.

Content on the site will be delivered in a Web browser but breaking news will be provided via text message. Ad revenue will be split 50/50 by AOL’s Third Screen Media and Quattro Wireless. This comes a month after TMZ partnered with MySpaceTV.

This site will do very well financially.

Last week I authored an article discussing Ask.com's new "algorithm" advertisements that are plaguing the cities around the world. No one gets them. They are not the type of ads that create buzz, either negative or positive. They are the type of adverts that you just walk by and not care or talk about.

But on the flipside, Ask has started some better online campaigns (not great but better!) in the last week or so. So far I have seen the ads on AskANinja and Digg.

Here is what I find interesting after doing a little bit of research. Michael Arrington seems to love Ask. While I assume he had nothing to do with the creation of the banners, Ask.com is obviously using his statements (see the images below) to help them gain some popularity.

Then, much to my surprise, Lindsay Lohan also seems to love Ask. In her new movie, she plays a girl who is dead and then comes back as some other alter-ego or something. Anyway the movie is about finding her and believe it or not she uses Ask to find herself! Maybe she already knows that Ask has the better algorithm! Here is a screenshot from the trailer.

So we seem to have two campaigns running currently. The outdoor "Algo" ads and the online "popular figure endorsement" ads. I think the latter is a better choice for Ask. The problem still lies in that getting techies to use the service is all well and good, but the majority of online users are not techies. Ask needs to follow my suggestions along with the other suggestions from Tony Hung and Josh Catone.