Articles in Headline
The East Festival in London will feature Pete Fowler keeping festival fans updated via his freshly painted Tweeting Bike.
Pete Fowler's Tweeting Bike
It’s a novel way to promote the festival and the @eastfestival twitter address as no doubt Pete will attract attention as he rides through the east london district.
You can check out Pete’s Flickr photo set here and follow the overall festival news via @eastfestival, or via the cleverly named #twike hashtag.
The agency behind this initiative is Chance Collective #twike
Here’s a great example on how to engage the socially influencial fans of your brand.
You”ll notice the campaign describes several phases of any social media campaign, including
- Recruitment of fans
- Engagement of fans
- Helping fans enlist their connections
Alan Long, Research Director for Hitwise reports that Social Media Traffic in Australia has nearly caught Search as depicted by the following chart.
Top 10 Social Networks in Australia are shown here, dominated by Facebook which boasts over 8 million Australians.
The net affect is that companies need more than ever to develop a strategy for Listening and Engaging with these networks so that they have the ability to influence consumers.
It’s surprising giving the hype surrounding Social Media, that it’s still quite a challenge to sell the adoption of social media to organisations.
There are many obstacles that stand in the way of running social media campaigns such as 
- Risks associated with open conversations
- Non existant Internal policies covering social media engagement
- Lack of internal communication of social media engagement policies
- Perceived lack of metrics
- Clarity of roles for managing the campaign
One of the hottest news for social communication this month was the beta launch of Google Wave.
Like a lot of people, I’m still waiting for my Beta invite – Google released 100K invites on Sept 30, 2009, and hopefully a 2nd wave of invites will come soon. {Update : Thanks to Gus for sending me a twitter invite soon after this post was published)
There is still lots of debate surrounding digital piracy.
Matt Mason’s new book “The Pirate’s Dilemma” addresses the issue of piracy demonstrating how piracy helped to evolve Hollywood prior to the existance of the internet. His book describes how piracy is an important source of innovation, and he describes how piracy can be used to effectively spread ideas. In doing so, Matt suggests how piracy itself can be leveraged as a valid business model.
Here’s a video of Matt talking about how youth culture is reinventing capitalism.
Be a Football Hero allows you to create a personalised audio commentary.
Select your name, country, and age, and then listen to the professional soccer (football) commentary of yourself performing the ultimate football heroics.
If you like what you hear, you can order the soundtrack as a CD for 14.99 pounds.
The soundtrack is very realistic, and you get to hear your surname and age as you score the match winning goal in the dying minutes.
Most of you would have heard of the “Will it Blend” videos, that do a fantastic job of promoting the Blendtec blender.
Today, I came across an interesting cross promotion featuring the founder and star of Will it Blend, Tom Dickson and one of the Ford Fiesta Movement agents, Ryan Dembroski.
The Ford Fiesta Movement has been one of the pioneering social media PR programs, which had over 4,000 people apply to become one of 100 agents. The successful agents were all given a new Fiesta for six months, and are expected to record and share their experiences with the car.
Augmented Reality is still quite new, but that hasn’t stopped some innovative agencies tapping into the technology to promote their client’s products.
First is the “Eminem Augmented Reality Competition” website which encourages fans to “spray art” on a 3D “E” and then submit it into a talent contest in the hope to win a whole bunch of prizes! The site was created by Outside Line and you can enter the competition here.
Looking like a big brother to the iPhone, the CrunchPad tablet PC from Techcrunch is likely to shake up the tablet computing market.
Crunchpad
At 18 mm thick, the tablet only works when connected to the internet. The device takes advantage of clever touch protocols that make for efficient and pleasant consuming of content. Rumoured to be priced at around US$300, the device could become a widely adopted method for reading online content.
One of the highlights from Cannes is the Wildfire stories.
You can watch the full presentation of Wildfire – Stories in full here presented by Contagious and Leo Burnett.
This year’s focus was on stories with a strong talkability factor to faster spread the word.
This is definitely where marketing communications needs to head.
Not all campaigns will be successful, but not having a brief, or having one that is “too brief” definitely increases the likelihood of failure.
The Brief is one of the most important stages of the marketing process, and yet many clients fail to see it’s importance, and either ignore it all together or pass this responsibility to the agency. Agency created briefs or “reverse briefs” can work well where the client / agency understand each other well, but there should still be some kind of approval step so that clarity of scope is understood.
7-Eleven in Sweden has released an iPhone app, that no only includes a 7/11 store locator, but also includes coupons for free coffee and biscuits. Users key in their phone number and then the unique coupons (that are only valide once) are delivered to the iPhone. April’s free coffee coupons will be followed by free ice cream in May.
Stockholm-based digital agency Lonely Duck developed the application and it had 2500 downloads in it’s first week.
Social data portability has been a hotly debated topic with a range of emerging standards competing for adoption.
Afterall, single signon to the web offers a great deal of immediate benefits for users.
Dataportability open standards group has been marketing the concept for a few years now, which supports the OpenID login standard and has been adopted by Yahoo, eBay, Photobucket, and Twitter, and MySpace. Google’s Friend Connect and Facebook’s Facebook Connect are both offering open API’s to developers who can integrate their own login details with one of these major players. Mashable has a good coverage of both of these tools here
Australia day is here for 2009, and a good chance to review the way digital has brought about change to the way we live.
Here are some key events from 10 years ago in 1999
- Mark Taylor was the 1999 Australian of the year
- Companies spent millions protecting themselves from the Y2K bug
- Google moved from their garage to their first office with a search market share of < %1
- George Bush criticised President Clinton on Kosovo saying “We need an exit strategy before going to war”
