Jul 07

Let’s make a viral!

Adrant’s has a post about a Coke press release announcing their latest viral. As a way of trying to get the video to be viral. And I continously hear the Account teams and creatives in the agency discussing what they are going to do for the viral element of a campaign.

So there is now an assumption that you need do nothing to get a viral other than call it a viral. Just churn something out, send it out to a few blogs and put it on a few video sites and away it goes. Now, having a good, targeted buzz campaign is always going to help something go viral, send out the seeds, so to speak. But it is not the only key to success.

The key – it has to be good. It has to give the viewer something. If i’m I’m going to waste 30 seconds or more watching or playing with something I have to get something back – a laugh, a sense of wow. Not just another ad that some agency has put on the web on You Tube that I would not stop the fast forward for on the TV.

The best virals are shared because they are good. And they can become self-sustaining after a while. How many people use the ‘Most viewed’ on YouTube to look for new things. Or use somethng like the Viral chart to see what is going on.

So instead of deciding how the next viral can be made and distributed, how about agencies focus more on making something remarkable first. Put into the strategy tools that make it easy to be viral if it takes off. If web based, give it a URL that can be linked to directly, don’t embed deep in a flash site. If video, let people take it away and put it on their sites, don’t lock down with DRM. Make it easy for people to send on, using send to a friend stuff…not everyone can work out how to copy and paste a link.

Just don’t assume that just because you call it viral that it will become one.

Jul 06

London 2012 a year on


The news comes through

Originally uploaded by RachelC.

A year ago a colleague and I wandered down to Trafalgar Square to watch the announcement about who would host the 2012 Olympics. The place was packed and had been filling up for hours. As the announcer stated London the place erupted with cheers and claps and then got filled with tickertape. London was up for a celebration and the papers the next day were filled with quotes and stories about how the Olympics would make a difference, how much everyone was looking forward to it. Forget the politics, the money issues, delays or any of the thigns that could go wrong, it was a week to look forward. The events that next day stopped that feeling in its tracks.

So this week we have the dichotomy in the news again, with Lord Coe on the news this morning promoting a day of celebration in Trafalgar Square; tomorrow will be a day of remembrance

Jul 04

Heatwave

I got back from New York to find Britain in the midst of a heatwave. Not that it is too much hotter than New York, and far less humid, but this is the UK – we really don’t do extremes. The weather reports have been giving out advice on how to cope with the wether, linking through to the NHSDirect site with advice on how to cope. Basically we should stay inside, don’t do a lot and drink lots of fluid. Sounds common sense, but yesterday lunchtime I walked into my local restaurant just as they were dealing with the aftermath of a lady with heatstroke.

But all things come to an end adn tomorrow we expect nasty thunderstorms and localised flooding, before the temps drop to more reasonable levels for the rest of the week.

Jun 29

Google Checkout


Google Checkout

Originally uploaded by RachelC.

Google Checkout launched today. The selling points are a single place to put your credit card info for multiple online sites, a fraud protection policy and anti spam measures, ie you don’t have to give you email address to the stores you buy from.

I usually sign up for most things google. But I did a stop and think when i went past the login page..the first thing it asks for is your credit card number. I know google has all my info, but I’m not too sure I want them to have that as well, yet. But digging into the ToS, I find out I can;’ anyway.

Despite having a full country listing, it turns out that I need a card from a US financial institution and that I am a resident of the US. OK, so why even allow me to choose a different country???

If I got over that hurdle, Google would then be able to run credit checks on me at any time they please. They are then going to retain information about every single transaction I make (although you can opt out of sharing the info between the part of the compnay doing the credit card stuff and the search part of the company). But that’s OK, they’re not going to sell it anywhere. they’re going to be keeping it just for themselves…the ultimate online loyalty card to track your everymove so they can target appropriate ads to you.

This could be regarded as a good thing – you’ll only ever get to see ads for things you are interested in. Then again, do you really want them to know everything you;ve bought online?

Jun 27

BBC and the editors

The BBC have opened to the public their internal blog from The Editors

Welcome to The Editors, a site where we, editors from across BBC News, will share dilemmas and issues that surround our services.

Jeff Jarvis talks about it here.

The blog explores the news behind the news, opening the process of gathering and producing programmes to the audience, giving a glimpse behind the curtain.

One interesting post from Kevin Marsh illustrates the ever-changing world that is English

Their latest complaints bulletin rules that Radio 1’s Chris Moyles wasn’t being homophobic when he called a ringtone “gay”. Young people – apparently – now routinely say “gay” when they mean “rubbish”. And the complaints committee is “familiar with hearing this word in this context”.

Read the comments, a good cross section of opinions from all ages, with some defending him for using the language of a primary audience to others challenging him for not setting an example. Although what example I’m not sure…this is not swearing as such, just the continued meaning change from ‘carefree’ to ‘rubbish’. It’s the opposite to nice, which moved from ‘stupid’ to ‘agreeable’.

The post also links to a paper about the relative severity of swear words and the changing of ranks between 1997 and 2005 (I think, could be slightly earlier). Most words stay in a similar rank, with the only major changes being with the racial abuse swear words, which are now seen as far more severe than they have been in the past

Jun 27

People formally Known as the Audience

Jay Rosen has a piece about the changing balance of power from media to all.

The people formerly known as the audience wish to inform media people of our existence, and of a shift in power that goes with the platform shift you’ve all heard about.

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You don’t own the eyeballs. You don’t own the press, which is now divided into pro and amateur zones. You don’t control production on the new platform, which isn’t one-way. There’s a new balance of power between you and us.

The people formerly known as the audience are simply the public made realer, less fictional, more able, less predictable. You should welcome that, media people. But whether you do or not we want you to know we’re here.

There are two elements at play in this change – wanting to create, to take and mix and drive new content and wanting to watch and participate at a time of choice. People may want to do both or one, but no longer are they passive consumers waiting to be fed by the media machine on the terms of the media machine.

Jun 27

The Naming of Things

Sitting in a restaurant last night watching the world go by, I was not really paying too much attention and thoughts were just floating across the brain. Everytime a car came by, it got classified as ‘car’, with exceptions for ‘policecar’, ‘taxi’ and ‘mini’. I’d probably put a name to the VW Beetle as well. In contrast, when dogs came past, the name of the breed normally floated past – French Bulldog, Pharoah Hound, small white fluffy thing stuffed in silly girl’s bag ;-).

The same non-conscious classification takes place in my brain when I scan Craig’s list. I’m looking at accommodation in New York, assessing costs and locations. So i scan down the list looking for interesting ones to read. And I find that I automatically classify certain one lines as spam. They have capital letters, asterisks, exclamation marks: “NO ***OPEN HOUSE*** Tue June 27th *** see details!!*** OPEN HOUSE”. These fall into the do not open mark, at least on first scan, as they are far too alike to the subject lines in spam emails. If you go into the ad, you usually find they have been placed by a broker/agent of some sort. If you are lucky, they have dropped the capitals but not always…sometimes the whole post remains in the SCREAMING mode.

If the people placing these ads do not know any netiquette, are they going to be any better in real life? Picking up things from Craigslist does depend on a certain amount of trust and these types of ads drop the trust measure before I get past the first hurdle. But I may not be the most typical of web user, even if research shows that people are getting more advertising savvy,, so these loud obnoxious liners may work. Is there research around that..comparing types of headlines for the ads?

Jun 26

People Aggregator Launches

Marc Canter’s Broadband Mechanics’ People Aggregator launches today. There are multiple ways to network through ‘relationships’, joining (and creating) groups and networks. It currently ties into Flickr and del.icio.us and allows you to post directly to your blog, using the service outputthis.com. There’s a strong structured blogging/microformats background, with the ability to add reviews, people, events, reviews etc. At the moment, people are just joining up (you can see the list growing on the first page). Looking forward to play with it…i”m joined as Rachel.

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Jun 21

Rooney returns

During the England-Sweden match today (great first half..second half they needed shooting!) the ESPN commentators made one of their random remarks that I so try and ignore about Wayne Rooney being plastered all over billboards and papers with the cross of St George. This made no sense until I say this post from W&K explaining the campaign. The image below (gratuitously taken from the W&K blog to avoid hotlinking) is plastered on a 20m by 30m billboard next to the M4; I’ve been along this road a lot and it can be a nightmare – I wonder how much of a jam they caused this morning when it was rolled out?

rooney_jdi.jpg

After being trailered yesterday, the Lynx advert is up for real today. The video is streamed – pity about the completely poor quality and the lack of controls… being abel to pause the video has to be good practice.

Jun 20

Second Life growing

Caught quite a few posts this week about Second Life.

You have the clothing compnay American Apparel opening a store.

The BBC are building a replica of their Maida Vale studios, from where they can simultaneously broadcast into Second Life as well as hving real-time interactions between band and audience. (From Jo)

And Jeremy has a great post about trademark issues in the virtual world.

For an environment that only has around 250,000 users (and how many of these are like me in that they have an account but do not use it that often?) there is a lot of marketing activity taking place. This is increasingly moving away from the selling of in-world artifacts to the use of it to supplement and develop the metspace activity. Companies are looking for the next big thing that is not MySpace and Second Life is getting the press. For those lucky enough to have the bandwidth to run it, it offers fantastic opportunities to interact with brands and companies of choice. This is reliant on these companies having the manpower to provide the interaction, which is always going to be a problem for anything corporate. The BBC, focusing on event driven activity, can manage the resource requirements (but how do they manage the licence payer issue as there appears to be no banning of IP addresses going on there).

The boom in companies moving into Second Life is likely to happen faster than the growth in inhabitants – at least whilst the PR of having a presence outweighs the fact there’s not a lot of people necessary going to see the virtual estate.

In the meantime though, the focus and increased press will bring in the lawyers looking at the IP issues as Jeremy suggests. It won’t be hidden away so easily and it can be easy picking for a lawyer in the future.

Jun 19

Policing the Sponsorship…guerilla marketing tactics

Watching bits of the Nederlands – Ivory Coast match on Friday I was surprised at a number of shots of the Dutch fans wearing their underwear. Not thinking too much of it (except I bet some of their mothers had something to say about always wearing good underwear because you never know when you are going to appear on TV) I put it down to same kind of motive as the fans who paint their faces.

Now I find that this was all part of policing commercial sponsorship. A lot (not sure of the numbers) had turned up wearing orange lederhosen sporting the name of a Dutch brewery, Bavaria. In the name of protecting the Bud sponsorship, officials had ordered the fans to remove the trousers…or at least the men (what happened to equality!)

Jun 18

London Pride and Football


London Pride

Originally uploaded by RachelC.

Yesterday I ended up in Williamsburg, in a pub watching a match betqween the US and Italy. The bar was pretty full, with everyone I saw watching the football as opposed to a baseball match that was on the other TV in the bar. The groans and cheers were in all the right places, so theis crowd at least got the game.

But on to the beer. Anheuser-Busch are getting a bad rep in Germany for sponsoring the World Cup…Bud is not the best beer in the world (it’s Carlsberg, probably..isn’t it?) and Bud is defintiely not good compared to the many German beers that can be found. But I don’t think US beer deserves the reputation it has. Many of the bars I’ve been into usually have a far better selection of locally brewed beers than many UK pubs. Yesterday, I was trying a nice Wiesse beer from the Brooklyn Brewery, the Sam Adams varieties tend to be pretty good and I’ve almost always managed to find something that is not just ‘lager’. The problem I think is lack of export – only the ‘big’ week, lager type stuff seems to be found in many other countries and that does deserve to be poorly regarded.

And the picture – one of many signs to adorn the walls of Mugs Ale House. A reminder of home, as I live about a mile from the brewery.

Jun 16

PS3 for Sale

The BBC is reporting that the Sony PS3 is now for sale on play.com for the grand price of 550GBP (I still can’t find the pound sign on this US keyboard). They are selling the 60GB HDD version, with Blu-ray, wifi and HD output.

The price is higher than previously predicted and although the release date is 17 November, it’s unlikely to be shipped before Christmas. So order now for your long six months wait.

I’ve still not decided if I am going to purchase one of these..the amount of gaming I do is minimal and this is a fair bit of money forfor something I’d primarily use as a DVD player. I think I may wait.

Jun 16

Weather Bugs

I’ve been messing around with the new Windows Live page. I think this currently looks nicer than the Google personal homepage, a lot softer with the colours and better on the eyes.

So I have the weather feed on both pages, as a comparison. They obviously come from different sources. Windows has New York raining and at 26C, whereas Google has it as partly cloudy and 31C. That’s a big difference in temp and precipitation 😉 The BBC is closer to Google, at sunny and 31C…that’s 2 out of 3 agreeing, so won;t be planning on doing anything energetic.

Google Weather

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Windows Live Weather

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Jun 16

RIAA sues…again

From Will Wheaton, it seems that the RIAA has decided that all the people dancing and miming to music on YouTube are breaking the law and need sueing, so they are sending C&D letters to them.

None of these videos are being made with the intention of profit (internet fame maybe, but not profit) and all they show is that people love the music and want to share it. This is community lead marketing of the powerful kind – word of mouth. But no, obviously the only marketing the music industry want is their own. But the 5million plus views that the Pixie video has received are worth nothing in their minds. Something wrong somewhere. Meanwhile take a look at the Director Kevin Smith doing the same

Jun 14

MySpace – Essential but not cool

A friend reported an overheard conversation in a New York bar. A women came late to a group of 20 something or others and started to talk about her MySpace profile; immediately the rest of the table all had a go at her for mentioning the service. After a while debting the merits of the service, the conclusion was that whilst it was no longer cool and should not be mentioned in polite conversation. However, the next big think has not yet been spotted by this crowd so it is still an essential to have…you just can’t talk about it.