I’m settling in nicely to my new job over here at Federated Media. I’m working on some great stuff. And to that end, I wanted to let everyone know of an event that FM is hosting in June here in NYC.

So I’m proud to announce the 2010 CM Summit, which will take place on June 7th and 8th at the Hudson Theater and Millennium Broadway Hotel in NYC. We will have some amazing speakers and conversation, which I will let our fearless leader John Battelle speak to in his post on the FM blog. As a preview, some of the booked speakers include Avner Ronen of Boxee, Dennis Crowley of Foursquare, Arianna Huffington of The Huffington Post, and Arthur Sulzberger, Jr. of The New York Times Corp. Here is the full list of speakers.

Some additional resources for your viewing pleasure:

CM Summit Website: http://www.cmsummit.com
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/cmsummit
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/pages/CM-Summit-NY
LinkedIn Group: http://www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=1005697

So book early. Every previous one has been sold out. Its going to rock!

Now here’s a useful application. CardStar is an iPhone application that enables you to put all your loyalty “reward cards” on your iPhone. Right now, I have six of these “fobs” on my keychain. With this application, instead of handing over your keychain to the cashier, or holding onto all sorts of loyalty cards that you use maybe once every few months, you can have all of them at your fingertips via your iPhone.

And I’ve got to think that the cashiers would be psyched that they don’t have to handle every person’s set of keys that have been sitting in a pocket or handbag. This alone could cut down on the spread of Swine Flu. OK, maybe not.

Man, I need to get an iPhone. Apple, when will it be on the Verizon network?

Where has the time gone?!? Burger King’s Subsurviant Chicken turns 5 today.

Five years ago today, a bunch of youngsters at two companies called The Barbarian Group and Crispin, Porter + Bogusky launched a small minisite three days in advance of the late night running of some broadcast spots. They wanted to iron out any last minute wrinkles in the site by emailing it around to a few more friends, and get a little early buzz before the spots ran.
In the next 48 hours, before the spots even had a chance to air, the little viral site that could had already bombarded the poor XServe in Crispin’s internal data center with 25 million hits. Within days, a cultural phenomenon was spawned.
All for a creepy dude in a chicken suit with garters, who looked like he was running some sort of shady web cam operation.

Here is blog post detailing the conception of this Internet and pop culture icon (get a cup of tea, its a long one).

Over the past week, we witnessed two distinct but related uprisings of customers voicing their opinions and companies backing down. It started with the Facebook Terms of Service fiasco, where FB made subtle but significant changes to their ToS such that there were questions over who owned the data that you have put on the social networking site. Eventually, Facebook backed off but the damage was done. This is a poster child for how NOT to handle this sort of change.

Then this week, Tropicana did an about face on a much more costlier change they made. Recently they released a new design platform for their brand and packaging and it was widely lambasted by critics and, most importantly, its customers. Today they announced that they would revert back to their more popular and pedestrian “orange with a straw in it” package design. On a side note, I don’t know who is advising or making the package design decisions over at Pepsi, but man, they are getting hammered.

These are again two very different but still clear demonstrations of how word of mouth and the power of customers coming together, rising up, and providing a big single fingered salute to companies will drive positive change.

Knowledge@Wharton recently posted an article on the Red Sox from a branding and marketing perspective. It talks about the Sox’ run to the 2004 World Series Championship and the notion that Red Sox Nation may not exactly know how to react to the fact that the Sox won it all, after 86 years of frustration and painful defeats. Its an interesting article however it re-inforces the notion that as much as we want to think “its just a game”, the reality is that its really all business.

And as irony would have it, the Red Sox lost last night to the White Sox in typical Red Sox fashion, when an error by Tony Graffanino led to a 5 run inning for Chicago. As the NY Times put it, “Just because the Red Sox won the World Series last season does not mean that baseball cannont torture them on occasion.”