Search results matching tag 'blogging'

Labour Party to use 'Against the Odds' film in election fight

255762 — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 11:26:00 GMT

The New Statesman reports that the Labour Party is to use the short 'Against the odds' film as part of its effort to fight the next election after a campaign by bloggers.

It's a short history of the Labour movement and is stirring stuff. It begins with the words: "It's the fighters and believers who change our world" with nods to party hero's like Nye Bevan; a mention of Cable Street and the fight against fascism; the formation of the NHS; the fight against Apartheid; and the creation of the minimum wage. All those moments are in there right up to Tony Blair and Gordon Brown.

The film goes onto say that "this history of Britain is the story of fighting for the right thing against the odds".

The campaign to get the film adopted was pushed by bloggers including Ellie Gellard on her The Stilettoed Socialist site ("Squashing Tory Trolls").

Nice work, take a look.

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Agencies not using social media well

255762 — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 10:19:00 GMT

The ad agency world is not shining when it comes to using social media to market itself, according to new research, but is pretty good at setting things up blogs and Twitter accounts and then infrequently updating them.

Overall, the **research from search consultants RSW/US found that very few agencies are using social media for new business prospecting.

The implications for that seem blindingly obvious: if you're pushing social media at your clients, but are not actively using it yourself (or just as bad using it well) then what kind of message does that send out?

Of social media used, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook are those that agencies are most often using. LinkedIn seems to be getting the most activity (56% use it most often), which the report says makes sense as it is a good resource for new business people looking to track down prospects.

However, while there are many signed up to LinkedIn there are far fewer (the report suggests) using it to share ideas or active participate in a community or LinkedIn group.

Overall 57% of agencies surveyed have a Twitter account; 74% LinkedIn; 56% a blog and 67% a Facebook page.

Those figures strike me as low. Why every agency doesn't have a blog is beyond me. It's cheap it is easy and in this business there is a great deal to blog about and to highlight to clients and new business prospects alike.

Even the 56% with a blog are pretty poor at updating: 45% never blog and 21% blog once a month or less. Once a month???

With Twitter the figures are worse. Of those on Twitter 74% tweet once a week or less indicating that agencies are taking a very passive approach to social media when the whole point about being social is being active and engaged.

To be fair Facebook fares better than Twitter and blogs, but I wonder if the social network is as useful here as Twitter or a blog.

Having a page on Facebook is not bad thing, but it doesn't strike me as useful as a regularly updated agency blog.

That said if you are not actually updating your agency blog or tweeting you have to wonder what activity is taking place on the Facebook page.

This is a US report, but my guess is the situation in the UK is even worse. On that note, there is a story on Ad Age today that asks the question: Are UK Shops Losing Their Touch in the Digital World?

While Daniel Bonner, European chief creative officer at AKQA and Adam Kean, joint executive creative director of Publicis, London, put in a good defence, former Saatchi & Saatchi creative director Dave Droga (now Droga 5 in NYC) argues that TV, press and outdoor are the primary focus of UK agencies; that there is less integration; and a tendency to default play it safe. Pretty damning stuff.

Former TBWA creative director and Howell Henry Chaldecott Lury founder Steve Henry, who of course has a blog on this site damns UK agencies further by saying that creativity is at an all time low. Ouch.

"The new interactive model requires a new mindset and a new skill set. Not everyone is able or willing to make the transition.

"Agencies have not risen to the challenge or brought in new skill sets, and their clients are looking elsewhere," he said.

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**The samples came from databases of 6,000 marketing service companies that range in size from under $5M in capitalized billings to over $50M.
212 agencies responded to the survey.

The social networking circle-jerk!

822535 — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 12:45:00 GMT

Readers of my US blog, AdScam, where informed yesterday that I have given up on Twitter. Why? Because in the last few days, I have had dozens of emails from very pissed off people asking why I am bombarding them with shitty emails flogging everything from insurance to condoms. Obviously someone has hacked my account. Just as someone phished my Facebook account FIVE times a few weeks ago. That’s whey I am no longer on Facebook.

Ah, you might say, but there are steps you can take, like changing your password and blocking certain url’s and IP addresses… But why the f**k should I? It's too much like hard work for little return. As someone commenting on AdScam puts it so well…

I completely understand George, if you really look at it.. this is what happens. To all of us. 1 - you get pushed to blog 2 - you get pushed to twitter 3 - you get pushed to Facebook 4 - you get pushed to LinkedIn 5 - you get pushed to digg 6 - you get pushed to YouTube 7 - you get pushed back to your blog. At the end of the day you run around to 2000 social media sites and what did you accomplish... you talked to the same people you would if you only stuck to your blog. because like all of us, we all are cycling to each of them... I read your blog.. then check my twitter feed and see snippets of what I just read. You know... the more I think about it.. the more I think George might be right.. it's a massive circle jerk.

I think you will see an increasing number of people beginning to question the time we are spending churning out so much useless crap. We are not all Steven Fry's. So from now on if you want to read my pearls of wisdom, you’ll have to settle for AdScam, MadScam and psfk.

A Huffington Post for Europe

255762 — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 11:21:00 GMT

A Huffington Post style start-up news site is up and running in Germany with plans later for an English version apparently in the pipeline.

Techcrunch reports that German Web 2.0 figure Lukasz Gadowski, who was previously behind online t-shirt firm Spreadshirt.com, is one of those behind online publishing venture that is going to be a kind of Huffington Post in Europe.

It's called The European. Yes, the same name used by Robert Maxwell for his newspaper way back when, which was later revised and died several times under Andrew Neil and the Telegraph Group's Press Holdings. The last incarnation of that was when Neil relaunched The European as a website. It didn’t last long. That was, of course, way before blogging.

Techcrunch reports that the site has/will have more than 20 journalists and possible contributions from the likes of European Commission President José Manuel Barroso, German car producers association’s president Matthias Wissmann or bishop Margot Käßmann.

Chief editor Alexander Görlach, who holds 50% of the company alongside Gadowski, reveals traffic is rising (from first day numbers of "5,000 readers and 30,000 page impressions") and that first month revenues are three times bigger than originally scheduled in the business plan.

The Huffington Post CEO Eric Hippeau recently said in an interview that it had ruled out European versions despite being approached: "It's not an international strategy, almost every week some pretty big organization would like to partner with us,” Hippeau said.

The UK is its biggest market and it is surprising that no one has tried a Huffington Post here (and they have ruled it out themselves).

Clearly, the market is a lot smaller and a lot of our newspapers have great blogging operations, but that said it feels like there is a gap there for an uber blog or two.

Unless after the demise of the likes of Shiny Media and other blogging operations there really is no money out there for what could be an expensive blogging operation to start-up.

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"Twitter: Unpoliced playground for paedos"

255762 — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 08:22:00 GMT

There was I under the impression there were not a great deal of teens on Twitter, when the Sun sticks on its front page this morning that the micro blogging service has become "a free and easy hunting ground for paedophiles seeking to lure kids for sex".

The tabloid claims that it uncovered this as part of a wider investigation into abuse of the ultra-successful blogging website.

It says that pornographic pictures of young girls are also freely available.

The Sun says it was shown an online conversation between a group of youngsters that had apparently been infiltrated by a pervert who asked a 13-year-old boy, who had posted a photo of himself and his sister on Twitter:

The pervert asked: "What do you like to do? Where do you like to go?"

The Sun says that the boy replied: "Are you coming on to me?"

The suspect said: "No, not at all. I'm just interested in finding out about you."

Maybe it's true, and I am sure that there are SOME teenagers on Twitter (but remember the city wake-up call? Teens don't tweet), but is it really a free an easy hunting ground as the paper says? I really don't think so although it makes a nice alarmist front page story.

As you read on in the story it looks more like the paper has made something out of maybe not a great deal, at least I hope so, as it quotes child protection expert Mark Williams-Thomas saying that looking at these tweets "I'd say the boy is being followed by an adult posing as a teenager".

Of course we've all been followed by porn bots and sites asking us to "click and see their pictures", but Twitter is pretty good at deleting these people and the other Twitter pages the Sun points to showing obscene images of Thai girls are clearly an example of that.

The paedophile thing is news to me, but I really have a problem believing it is widespread as the paper makes out. With all these advertising, digital, marketing and media types there's no room or place for the scum of the earth.

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More on US Health Care!

822535 — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 15:51:00 GMT

One of the comments on my last post implied that people who work in advertising shouldn’t be too fussy when it comes to deciding whether or not they wanted to work on certain kinds of accounts… ‘Cos they pay your wages! This drove to write a comment in reply, which I then decided to turn into a post… Here it is…

@media village...
Does this mean you would like to see the return of cigarette advertising? I mean if it's all about holding down a job and paying the bills you may as well advertise everything with no restrictions. How about porn, snuff films, gladiator fights to the death, booze for tots?

The point is that right now in the US, as I am sure you know, there is a whole flap about reforming health care, which costs lots more than any other civilized country and delivers some of the worse results. In fact for 47 million with no insurance, it delivers no results. Standing right next to the insurance companies in this fiasco are the drug companies. And right next to them are the agencies, who have made hundreds of millions in the last few years.

As ad agencies we are tasked with encouraging consumers to demand very expensive branded products, when generics for a tenth of the price are just as good. And in a great many cases an aspirin would probably do as much good. I go into this in great detail in The Ubiquitous Persuaders. For some reason Amazon isn’t offering this in the UK… But, as it’s available on Kindle, come January, you’ll be able to get it on your iPhone… And because I am a prince. If anyone wants to read more, I’ll see if Gordon wants to run that health care chapter on BrandRepublic.

Here Lies the Wave

692072 — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 12:30:00 GMT

So, I've spent a week or two experimenting with Google Wave. I've had some correspondence with some journalists I know, a Vistage colleague in the US, other people who run digital agencies. And it's been a frustrating experience.

I think partly the way they've done the beta release is to blame. It seems that very few large communities of people that already correspond have been given a pool of invitations. So conversation has been very fragmented. The beauty of Wave, which is a kind of rolling discussion incorporating instant messaging, social media, productive wiki and email, can't show itself clearly when there are six of you but not all on the same wavelength at the same time.

One of the features I found quite interesting is that you can incorporate a Wave into a web page. In my case I hosted a Wave in my blog for a week, and people who were logged in to Wave could view the embedded Wave and people in the conversation could interact with it. My coding's not up to much, so it didn't look particularly elegant, but it's a far cry from the basic comment field.

So I think that one day Wave could be awesome. While some of my online colleagues didn't see the attraction, I think it might become quite a revolutionary step. For example, imagine constructing a collaboratively-generated screenplay or feature article, where several people can be involved in different time zones, editing previous contributions and suggesting new, constantly honing and refining, fact-checking, editing and clarifying as you go along, until the final polished artifact is ready. On the other hand, I can see all sorts of mischief; and the experience of wiki, where attribution and defacement become important, may have to be revisited.

It's not in itself particularly original – it is after all an agglomeration and blurring of the borders between a whole host of technologies that have been around for between 15 and 30 years – but it may take discussion itself to a whole new level.

Blog Action Day 2009 Takes On Climate Change

2292853 — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 14:47:00 GMT

Today 8,000+ bloggers from 144 countries, reaching 11 million viewers, are joining together to chime in with posts about one single important global issue of climate change. Did you post yet? Visit the Blog Action Day website to find out more about this event.

I take climate change personally.

I live here on earth, along with you and millions of others, and the damage our planet is facing because of manmade, careless actions infuriates me and makes me sad. Nature has given me some of the most memorable moments in my life. Today in London we have a beautiful day and I am enjoying seeing the sunlight light up the green leaves on the plants I have on my balcony. I'm enjoying looking at the green trees I can see scattered across parks in my neighborhood, and I'm looking forward to pulling away from the computer soon and going outside to enjoy this day before it slips away.

Will these simple pleasures I have from nature be no more in the face of climate change?

What personal moments spent with nature will only be left to memory, if every one of us does not do something right now to prevent climate change from happening?

Will the world leaders gathering at Copenhagen in December for the United Nations Climate Change Conference think enough about their own special personal memories of enjoying the natural environment, to make a true difference in how we tackle climate change issues?

Climate change is personal for me, and for you.

I've shared three very personal memories about experiences I've had in the natural environment on my blog for Blog Action Day 2009 and hope to read other blogs that tell stories about why they care about climate change.

Please post on your blog about your thoughts about climate change, and let's see if collective blogging can make a difference on this issue.

Taking climate change personally,

-Lisa

President Sarkozy dans le mer*d!!!

822535 — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 03:45:00 GMT

In the truth is stranger than fiction dept, French satirical investigative journalism weekly “Le Canard Enchaîné,“ has outed holier-than-thou French president, Nicolas Sarkozy for violating copyright laws.

In a stunning display of hypocrisy, the presidential department of audiovisual services produced 400 unauthorized copies of the 52 minutes documentary “A visage découvert : Nicolas Sarkozy“. This while President Sarkozy, just happens to be the one pushing the HADOPI law, which would disconnect the Internet service of an alleged copyright pirate after three allegations of infringement.

This isn't the first time he's been connected to copyright violations, either. His party had to pay €30K for using a song at a political rally without authorization. If he were subject to his own law, which is in effect a three strikes and you’re out provision, President Sarkozy would be having his Internet disconnected the next time he pirates something.

I wonder if Carla has checked her CD collection recently?

I just need $100 million to start this new social network. Trust me, it’s going to be worth billions!

822535 — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 21:29:00 GMT

Did you happen to read the amazing interview in Monday’s Wall Street Journal with Jeff Horing, co-founder of Insight Venture Partners, a New York private-equity firm that was the lead investor in Twitter’s third and latest fund-raising round?

These are the geezers who just pumped in $100 million in funding to the 140 character wunderkindt, to give it a valuation of over ONE BILLION F******G DOLLARS. This for a company that to date, generates not one penny in revenue.

When asked about this amazing number, Horing said… “When we modeled it, we were looking at revenue somewhere between Google and Facebook. Google monetizes at $30 a user and Facebook is about $2 a user. If you look at Twitter’s user community and make some fairly conservative assumptions about revenue, we thought you could make a healthy exit at a multiple of a $1 billion.”

Hey, pardon me, but based on the Google and Facebook numbers, and the fact the Twitter's founders have made no bones about how at this stage, they don’t have a bloody clue how they’re going to start making money… For this guy to claim they are making conservative assumptions about revenue, smacks of either pig-headed bravado, or pig headed stupidity.

Remember, it was just three short years ago that Rupert Murdoch paid over half a billion dollars for MySpace, and all the pundit's said it was a steal? Now after massive layoffs, it’s leaking money like a sieve, and in all the happy chat about social media, it hardly ever gets mentioned.

In the Social-Sphere, three years is an eternity.

Something smells like Boo.Com to me.

Search results matching tag 'blogging'

Labour Party to use 'Against the Odds' film in election fight

Agencies not using social media well

The social networking circle-jerk!

A Huffington Post for Europe

"Twitter: Unpoliced playground for paedos"

More on US Health Care!

Here Lies the Wave

Blog Action Day 2009 Takes On Climate Change

President Sarkozy dans le m*e*r*d!!!

I just need $100 million to start this new social network. Trust me, it’s going to be worth billions!

President Sarkozy dans le mer*d!!!