Influencers: How trends and creativity become contagious.
This documentary examines the role of influencers on society. With an increasingly online world, the viral nature of influence is accelerated. From obscurity to mainstream and through to burnout from overexposure, the rapid pace of influence via Word-of-Mouse can be fascinating to observe. Go to the full version.
Source: 1000heads
Infographics are de rigueur but ones that actually tell you something meaningful and are instantly comprehensible are rare. This neat walk-through from 1000heads tells the story well and provokes an action. I have chosen to write about the topic and share the graphic.
“Ketchup is a simple and gorgeous web app for sharing meeting notes, ideal for home businesses that can’t boast a secretary. It’s free for a limited amount of time”
How useful, I thought. A free web based application that could be applied in the workplace and increase the integration of everything ever with the web. The review appeared on the Enterprise Nation website, a useful resource for home based businesses.
My interest in clicking through to the Ketchup website itself was sufficiently piqued thanks to the explanation of the simplicity of using the app, that and the name is a conversation starter in itself.
Keeping track of meetings, who said what and when that very ‘what’ was to be done by can be an infuriating consequence of meeting notes that dont make sense two hours after the conclusion.
A name like Ketchup for a professional business application already suggests a tongue-in-cheek attitude resides behind the branding but if you have the misfortune to land on their website using Internet Explorer you are in for a surprise.
OK, the message is a touch cheeky and other good web browsers are available but not only is the door shut to you as a potential user, the almost holier-than-thou-message you get is internet snobbery at its worst. Sure, IE has its foibles and I have a loyalty to Chrome for personal usage but why not cater for a further 37%, especially when there is evidence of the application changing to a paid for version in the future.
Just in case I thought it was just me suffering a momentary lapse or a complete funnybonectomy and getting uptight, I consulted my Twitter following and got the following reasoned responses:
As a Mac user, I sometimes find sites I can’t access at all. My thoughts aren’t printable. Let’s just say I go elsewhere
If you’re using IE, you deserve everything that’s coming to you. might be doing yourself out of a lot of traffic tho.
I’d be grumpy and wouldn’t go back, unless I got that message regularly from lots of sites due to using an ancient browser.
What do you think? If a website was condescending about the browser you were using and didnt let you use their site…what would you think?
That’s right, move along now. This blog is undergoing a ‘strategic review’. It shall cease to provide content, a reduction in function and endless requests to click to here until the new year.
This is due to a relocation of Me and the need to change the purpose, design and function of this blog for Me. In the meantime you could do no worse than to check out the following blogs:
The Fixed Factor – cycling and sinister foods in equal measure
EmailFail – the good, the bad and the html purist
Trick Click – a great website packed with resources
…a pinch of salt – the tastiest blog in Bristol
Answer Me This! – The best podcast around
Happy Christmas y’all and see you in the shiny new year!
Celebrity endorsements are nothing new, if anything, in this uber celebrity 15 minutes of fame driven society they are on the increase but what do they actually do for brands and where are the endorsements of the future going?
There are recent notable examples of brands dropping their celebrity face in the wake of revelations and tabloid conjecture. Notably, Kerry Katona, the bastion of motherhood, being ditched by Iceland on the back of Sunday tabloid revelations relating to substance abuse beyond a £1 Iceland ready-meal.
When pairing up a celebrity with a brand and things go well, it is easy to kick back and relax. That massive chunk of funding you have given this public eye entity was money well spent. Gary Lineker never got booked in his career and has carved a niche as ‘Mr Nice Guy’ so no sweat over him doing something bad like popping a cheeky Pringle.
But a brand can not control the one they pay to endorse. You can have as water-tight a contract as you like that says as a beacon of the brand you can not do this or dabble in that, but celebrities are human, they are suckers for temptation when they are offered the world and they do stray.
To the future, I envision a slight change in the role of celebrity endorsements and this is with a view to the use of Twitter and Facebook. This theory is based on observations of how things are starting to unfold on these platforms.
Agencies can now create the celebrity and thus control their brand endorsing face more carefully. For example, Compare the Market and their ingenious and ubiquitous Compare the Meerkat campaign has seen sales increase and thanks to a combined social media assault through Facebook and Twitter, Sergei – the little furry face of cheaper car insurance has single paw-dly hit the big time. Through an interactive and engaging Twitter and Facebook account, not to mention the Compare the Meerkat website itself, our little Russian friend has driven traffic and sales to the desired Compare the Market website without a single mention of the target site in its Facebook or Twitter activity. No tweets with links to the best deal or target site homepage, just pure character based tweets and a killer catchphrase that has reverberated around playgrounds, offices and everyday conversation. Simples.
Facebook and Twitter celebrity accounts with mass followings (and comparatively minuscule follow backs themselves) provide a ready made platform to endorse anything for a fee to their impressionable and idolising following. The rules have changed and results are there for the taking.
If you take the example of Stephen Fry and his Twitter account, not through paid for endorsement but out of his passion to share great Tech tips, on several occasions, Mr Fry has brought small time websites to their knees by Tweeting a recommendation to his vast following to go and check out site X. Site X not being prepared for such a volume of traffic crashes-the hat tip from Mr Fry a blessing and curse in equal measure.
So of the future, celebrity accounts will be created and maintained by agencies and not the Celebs themselves. (I am still hugely sceptical that Andy Murray updates his Twitter given the nature of the Tweets-all smiles and positivity-it appears awkward, forced and just not personable.) As soon as the following is built up, then the link to product or website X is casually dropped into Twitter conversation and the loyal following navigates to the intended source and laps up what their idol has recommended.
Sure the same pitfalls apply in that you cannot control the celebrity’s behaviour in real life, that is of course unless you create a fictional Meerkat, but you can cultivate the following and control the brand message with a yield of higher results for a fraction of the cost of a television advert.
It doesn’t take Jonathan Creek to work out that the clumsy sleight of hand at work here was not that of Houdini, no the Harry who done it is in fact PR.
On the day that Alan Davies released his book ‘My Favourite People and Me 1978-1988,’ a collective of musings published by Michael Joseph, a prominently placed article about our tousled locks hero appeared on the BBC news homepage.
The story in question relates to the subtle slip of the tweet made by @alandavies1 that in order to pursue his role as JC he would be stomaching a 25% pay cut. Timing is everything, national press picks up on the story and voilà…coverage, a raised profile, book sales and much more…
It came to my attention yesterday that Alan Davies would be in Bristol come October as part of the fantastic Autumn programme put on by the Bristol Festival of Ideas. Perhaps I could discuss the PR strategy with the man himself or maybe his publishers could supply me with a copy of his book in advance of the event so I can ask him something, well, something Quite Interesting.
As perverse as it is, the death of Michael Jackson will be widely regarded by those out to make a buck as the perfect marketing platform. Marketing around an event is exactly the focus that is needed to drive sales. Some will view it as sickening cynicism so close to the event of his passing but it has been said before that death can be the greatest career move in terms of finance generation.
The upcoming series of gigs at London’s O2 were in part somewhat likely to have added to the downfall of MJ but were essential in order to pay off the vast debts he had accrued in life. For those who paid for their tickets through legitimate sources, a refund will be forthcoming. For those who paid through the nose on Ebay and by other means-a refund may not be so readily available. Now this isnt attributable to the power of marketing, but it would be a safe bet to see ticket sales of the concerts increase slightly even in death. Why would anyone want to part with serious money for something that has no return? This is where we come round to the memorabilia bandwagon that was taking a good oiling to the axle during the hours of confusion over whether or not the death of Michael Jackson was truth or hearsay.
It is known from a friendly source, HMV issued an e-mail that was in the Inbox of branch manager’s across the nation come Friday morning that any Michael Jackson stock should be moved to the front of house and that additional stocks would be in place for the weekend.
Of course, much like radio stations across the land, the only playlists in stores that sold Jackson products were the songs of Michael Jackson through the years. The weekend’s online commercial activity appears to have been dominated by the sale of his music. Back catalogue packages on iTunes saw Jackson’s chart ranking soar akin to his physical format success in his prime. By Sunday Jacko was topping nearly every possible chart.
According to CNN, “Almost 20,000 items were up for sale after his death on the popular auction site eBay, where collectors could snap up everything from the rare to the ridiculous.”
As of Saturday morning, the BBC had shipped out a team to LA (despite the fact they have one based there already) to cover the public mourning and invited a street dance troupe to perform a tribute-said dancers were all wearing various boxfresh Jackson t-shirts bearing messages of ‘RIP’ and ‘We Miss You.’ It is dificult to put a finger on what may have been the more likely reality-was merchandise printed up before death or was it a frighteningly rapid turn around of product conception to product launch?
As a tweet by Harriet Crosse (Director of Bristol PR Specialists 72point) explained, for those in the PR game looking for column inches come the first Saturday after his death, they need not bother chasing around after journos and editors. On that Saturday, in many instances, the first 10+ pages of tabloids were devoted to the troubled star and his demise.
As a Royal wedding sees commerative plates and other related frippery and tat become common place in shops and newspaper’s readers offers, a Michael Jackson plate may not be too far off.
When the Bath Bus Station Customer service blog and Twitter account hit the scene it made a big impact pretty quickly. For a company like First, so besieged by negativity and bad press (on the whole justified) it was a breath of fresh air to see them engaging with the customer at such a level that showed personality, empathy and above all, a desire to make things better.
The blog launched on October 13th 2008 and introduced itself in a polite and engaging manner. By the second day of blogging, they were answering the questions that the humble early adopters of the blog were all asking, ‘Why does a bus station need a blog for its customer services? Buses go from A to B, they breakdown halfway and are usually late, a blog isnt going to help me with that is it?’
The blog’s line was:
“In the Customer Services Department at Bath Bus Station, we are always looking for new ways to keep in contact with our customers… providing updates about local issues, events etc, and discussing the problems that matter to you so we can work to improve the quality of service you enjoy.”
Over the nine month duration, of what is termed as a social media experiment, the blog and Twitter account brought us such delights as Diversion – Service 5, numerous service updates as and when they happened and my favourite blog post, ‘Lost Property‘. Perhaps the greatest success story was the provision of detailed and honest updates throughout the disruption caused by the snow chaos in February.
Bath, as a destination has been richer for its pioneering use of social media when relating public transport to those that use it and for First, it was a true feather in their cap to put funding and resources behind the venture, it is just a shame that when cuts need to be made, the customer service element is what goes out the door, especially when their profits are up!
Of course these cut backs are common place in larger organisations. First will be streamlining their customer service workforce and decamping the overall operation to a regional arm in Exeter, another common practice in itself.
It is a great loss that this service is being axed. I can not think of a customer service presence across any social media platform that I have found more engaging and informative-even as a non-Bath bus user. Perhaps it is too late to instigate a Twitter petition and I dont envisage the 605 followers of the @bathcsc Twitter account turning their pictures First Bus blue in solidarity but First have let themselves down once again.
The experiment comes to an end as of Friday 26th June. I for one have taken great pleasure and learned a great deal about how to be the voice behind a company presence online in my own employment. I hope that the online media savvy operators of the service are not facing unemployment as a result of First culling their activities and hope that First reconsider their position.
