Search results matching tag 'Blogs'

C4 to invest in political blogger Slugger O'Toole

2673403 — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 09:30:00 GMT

Channel 4's 4iP fund is to invest in one of North Ireland's best known and influential political blogs Slugger O'Toole.

PaidContent reports that the C4 is continuing to investing in projects that "keep an eye on money and power". The investment is a joint venture with media agency Northern Ireland Screen. No details as of yet if C4 has taken an equity stake.

Started by political journalist Mick Fealty in 2002 it now comprises a team of contributors.

Good Experiential Blogs

1278503 — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 11:17:40 GMT

There seem to be loads of American ones but any recommendations for UK blogs please? http://www.hotcow.co.uk/mooTalk.htm is quite good and regularly updated.

Re: Your views

2633832 — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 16:45:09 GMT

Hi Jackie,

I work for a Projection Advertising company and although we felt the recession through the summer we didn't cut our marketing spend although we did try to refine it. When things are going well there is a tendancy to think "if it ain't broke don't fix it." As soon as we started to feel the pinch we refined our pay-per-click advertising as well as looking towards a greater online PR presence.

Check out the company here www.projectionadvertising.co.uk

Brad

Brand Republic Blogs -how do I get one?

2657912 — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 13:39:54 GMT

I'm interested in start a blog here at brand republic to chronical the development of my company brand, but I can't seem to find a way of setting one up...and the FAQ loads an error page.

Can anyone help?

Many thanks
Adam

Blogs are big business…just not here

255762 — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 10:50:00 GMT

With Shiny Media going into administration yesterday there is a timely piece in the FT today on blogs. Yes, they're big business in the US (its like the FT just noticed), but here start-ups have struggled to replicate the success of the Huffington Post and Gawker. Is the UK simply too small?

We wrote about Shiny Media's fall last night and Lisa Devaney has blogged about it here as well. A real shame to see it fail. Maybe its strategy wasn't all there, it certainly had missteps along the way (like its move into football that resulted in Who Ate All The Pies being put up for sale), but I think the people at Shiny produced some very good work and ultimately it appears to have been a small publisher hit by the recession.

Its woes (I'm guessing) were no different to any other online publisher. There is not enough revenue out there. Not as much as anyone would like to support such a business.

What's clear is that while blogs like the Huffington Post, Talking Points Memo, The Business Insider, Gawker and quite a few more do good business in the US, the UK market appears too small to sustain even quite a compact firm like Shiny.

This is a shame as I often think that media owners don't do blogs very well (The Guardian and a couple of others aside), but there doesn't seem enough advertising oxygen to do them independently and make a living.

Shiny is, of course, not the first UK blog start-up to go down. Glitterdtich closed last year. I don't know what Shiny was getting for its online advertising, but I doubt it was achieving the levels that newspapers are or anything like it.

In the US, as the FT notes, US blogs have hit the level where they are able to charge about what a big US newspaper charges for online advertising. The Business Insider's rate card for instance is up to $30 per 1,000 impressions. Gawker has a rate card CPM of around $50 (of course, it doesn't mean it gets that).

They are also pulling in millions of dollars in venture capital, but here the story is different. The Shiny Media was variously reported to have attracted $4.5m in funding in 2007 from Bright Station Ventures, but apparently the veracity of those reports is not 100%. With co-founder Katie Lee (who left earlier this year) saying: “It was incorrectly reported in the press and we were told to stick with the story. Was mortified.”

Shiny Media's blogs will no doubt continue as the company gets snapped up by someone (at least I hope it does), but it looks unlikely that anyone in the UK is going to be using blogging as a launch pad for anything major any time soon with the way the market is.

But it would be nice to try. It all comes down to the ideas.

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'The slow death of blogs' (again)

2545541 — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 09:39:00 GMT

Last week Charles Arthur wrote an, as you'd expect much discussed, Guardian piece on the long tail of blogging 'dying.' His rationale was that in the long term, people are turning to more immediate and concise services such as Twitter and Facebook updates to share their thoughts.

This is a theme that comes around time and time again. For example, last October, Paul Boutin wrote an article on Wired entitled "Twitter, Flickr, Facebook make blogs look so 2004."

The numbers don't show a decline

Charles Arthur quotes the Technorati stat from last year that shows that 95% of the 133 million blogs are basically dead - abandoned due to lack of interest or time. But that's still seven million+ that are alive and well.

And on his data mining blog, MSN's Matthew Hurst produced a series of graphs to prove that blogs aren't declining. He took a series of common (not news led) terms like car repair and birthday, things that you'd imagine to be fairly consistent year round.

Looking at Blogpulse (which Matthew co-created), he found 142 posts about car repair on 4 Jan and 144 on 21 June. Similarly, he took the term 'birthday' and found the trend to be fairly straight.

Does Twitter actually give blogs a new lease of life?

I'd also take the opposite view to Charles Arthur: Rather than spelling the kiss of death, Twitter and Facebook give a lot of blogs a new lease of life.

From personal experience of my own (News from the Herd) blog and from looking through this blog's stats at Get Clicky, I know I get around 5% of my monthly unique visitors from Twitter. While that doesn't sound like a lot, that's 120 odd readers I'd normally not have and I know that for other blogs the % figure is much higher.

That's because in a lot of cases, Twitter is not a self contained place to have conversations (the stereotype being it's where people blast off 140 character thoughts about what they had for breakfast), it's somewhere where conversations kick off that get taken elsewhere.

So I predict that in a year's time we'll still be having 'decline of blogs' type pieces...and plenty of posts like this in return.

Blogging is dead - long live blogging

As an aside, A List blogger Steve Rubel recently announced that he's done with blogging...actually not really as he admits himself.

What he's done is move his blog over onto Posterous. While he calls Posterous a lifestream, we're really talking semantics as Posterous is a blogging platform that's a few steps on from blogger in terms of functionality, in that it integrates better with Twitter, Facebook and video sharing sites.

It's something I'd been considering (and no doubt a lot of other bloggers) myself - moving this site onto a system that gives me a few more options - and no doubt with Steve's lead others will now follow. The point is, it shows that the blogging industry isn't permanently stuck back in 2004, but continues to evolve.

Image - Matthew Hurst / Blog Pulse

Social media and the Iranian election

255762 — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 10:07:00 GMT

On Wired.com, Andrew Exum is wondering all about Iran and the explosive use of social media to organise, agitate and protest in Iran. He's wondering how real it all is? And if it is the technological enabled few rather than the digitally deprived masses.

He wrote: "Are we simply finding common cause with a technologically-assisted minority and confusing it for a popular movement? One observer of the Moldova protests noticed the way in which we Westerners get fascinated by 'Twitter revolutions' because, hey! We use Twitter too!"

The Wired piece quotes others who are not convinced, but from the pictures it looks bigger than the technological few. The few might have Twitter accounts, but they are it seems being used to organise and bring others together in massive protests.

There is so much going on and a lot of summaries are already around, but here's some of the multitude of links and posts that are coming out of the protests.

#IranElection is the top search term on Twitter which is being used by Iranians to co-ordinate protests and post photos and messages in the wake of the presidential election on Friday.

The opposition reformist candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi is using updates via Twitter and is using it to rally his supporters. One message on Mousavi1388 asks: "Confirmed by BBC Persian, please tell everyone to join them: Mousavi, Karoubi & Khatami will be at the protest. #IranElection"

When it appeared that Twitter was about to shut down for 90 minutes downtime tonight for maintenance, Twitter decided to reschedule the maintenance so the protests could go on.

Mousavi's Twitter feed also made a direct appeal to Twitter: "@twitter Twitter is currently our ONLY way to communicate overnight news in Iran, PLEASE do not take it down. #IranElection"

Yesterday @Mousavi1388 had 7,000 followers on that particular Twitter feed and today it has nearer 10,000. Another Twitter feed @StopAhmadi has more than 7,000 followers. A third feed, @Persiankiwi, has more than 18,000 followers.

The Twitter feed is being used as an unofficial media channel and one that is becoming indispensible for journalists covering the post election story. A tweet this morning, says: "URGNT@ ALL jornlsts, Tday 15:30 Prss Conf. in Tehran, Sadr MotrWay, Kave Shomali Blvd, Roshanayi St, Bahar Shomali St. Num. 9 #IranElection".

Mousavi's Facebook page has more than 53,000 supporters and many Facebook members have posted video while others are trying to persuade fellow Facebook users to change their personal icons to the colour green to show support for the Iranian opposition.

Users on Twitter are also trying to persuade fellow tweeters to change their location to Tehran to make it harder for agents of the interior ministry to track down protesting Iranians.

Blogs are also playing a major role. Iran has always had a large community of bloggers, not least because the number of young people in the country, and many are writing about the protests and like photoblog Tehranlive.org are posting photo updates hourly.

Others are posting images to Flickr and Google's Picasa and making the albums freely available on the web with hundreds of videos being uploaded to YouTube.

A real time feed of images being posted from Iran can be found on PicFog and Twitter users are using the likes of Twitpic to upload their images.

The increasing array of Twitter apps are all playing their role in the protests. Twitter search engine Twazzup is tracking all things Iran-related on Twitter.

Saeed Valadbaygi's 'Revolutionary Road' is one that provides a good source for pulling various coverage of the protests together.

As well as Iranian bloggers international news organisations, including the BBC, which with its Persian service has become a focus for Iranians and widely praised although it was being jammed intermittently over the weekend, and blogs like the Huffington Post, The Atlantic's Andrew Sullivan's blog and the New York Times' The Lede blog are covering the aftermath of the elections in detail.

Others such as the National Iranian American Council is live blogging events blog aggregation site Global Voices has a special section and is translating reports from the Iranian blogosphere.

CNN has not had a good protest. It has come in for some heavy criticism for failing to focus on Iran in depth and thousands used the label CNNfail on Twitter to vent their frustrations. Since then CNN has since ramped up its coverage, but it could be too little too late.

Follow me on Twitter

Blogs let in the underwear brands in Saudi Arabia

2545541 — Fri, 15 May 2009 15:12:00 GMT

Think you have a marketing challenge? Consider then the task of marketing lingerie in Saudi Arabia. Not only is it strictest state in the Middle East when it comes to 'morality' laws, you have the odd situation of only men being allowed to sell underwear to women - something that has prompted a boycott campaign.

As reported in the latest edition of Middle East marketing trade magazine Communicate, the solution for brands has been to publish their ads online and have them forwarded virally.

For example, one creative put forward last year by Ogilvy on behalf of Danish lingerie and swimwear brand Change poked fun at the censorship laws in the region, which results in Western magazines arriving with black felt tip marks over images considered too revealing.

Using taglines such as ‘censor anything but the bikini’ and 'edit anything but the bra', the whole body of a model was covered up with marker pens except the hands and face.

The campaign was deemed too close to the bone to run as an above the line campaign, but it did appear as in-store POS material, and went online.

According to Mazen Hassan, creative director of Ogilvy Jeddah, “We submitted it to several local and international blogs, and it was a huge success. Ladies used to e-mail me telling me they really liked it and that they thought it was really smart, because it bends the rules in an acceptable way.”

Essentially the digital arena is one of the few areas where women can get up close to brands with relative freedom.

According to Milos Illic of TBWA / Raad Dubai, which also covers the Saudi market and handles rival lingerie brand Nayomi, digital is a “fantastic opportunity...customers could interact with the brand, immerse themselves in it. They could do wonders in Saudi with digital.”

Working in the Saudi market as a marketing creative is obviously challenging especially if you come from a Western ‘anything goes’ environment, but I imagine it’s one that forces you to think harder of ways to get around the various barriers, with online being key to that.

As the Communicate article says: “With the Internet allowing for more creative freedom, digital could prove a highly effective bypass route for the Saudi advertising market”, and slowly push the boundaries.

Are blogs pants?

917990 — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 12:02:00 GMT

I heard this week of a lingerie e-commerce site who'd boosted conversion by 23% by including articles in their blog.

So it turns out the knicker elasticity of demand is directly related to editorial content (sorry).

The serious point to be made is that blogs are a brilliant format for engaging your customers online and this is natural PR territory where writing skills meet commercial aims.

Some Media Prominence findings this month showed that in markets like lingerie, where research is involved before purchases are made, PR can also account for nearly half of brand value.

So that's PR that creates brand value, manages reputation, shifts stock and is measurable. Not too pants that huh.

Re: Marketing 2.0 Conference in Paris in March 30/31 - Does anybody go?

2345847 — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 17:08:27 GMT

Hey Finn, are you talking about 'The Power of Social Media' conference on the 30th and 31st March? I bought my ticket last week after hearing so much about it on Twitter! It sounds amazing - you should really look into it if you're interested in social media/digital advertising. The website is www.iwomc.com