Eyes front!
Stand to attention.
The interactive boot camp is rolling into town and this is your chance to get the lowdown on online media from some of the country’s experts.
And if you are able to go, this will be your chance to get up close and shouty with Katie Chatfield. Enjoy!
Ever wanted to see your money grow before your very eyes? Well here is one way …
By contributing to this fundraising effort in the name of our dear friend, CK’s mother, Sandra Kerley, you will be helping a great charity and positively creating change in other people’s lives.
This donation page has been setup by Cam Beck and all donations will go directly to Habitat for Humanity. You can donate as little as $2 … and every dollar counts!
Advertising campaigns can cost a great deal of time and money, and as such, they come with many risks and challenges for all involved. For the agency operating in a cut-throat market, one bad campaign can see the end of an account, for the agency team the risk is to their livelihoods and reputations … and there are the same or similar risks on the client side — loss of job, organisational standing and reputation. But with risk comes reward … accolades, awards and fat bonus cheques await the winners.
With all this, really, there is little wonder that the emergent forms of marketing receive little attention from those who carry and control the big advertising budgets. Afterall, the potential fallout from a mis-step in the realms of social media could cause an impression that lasts long after the campaign is forgotten — these days our glories AND our blunders can live long lives on YouTube and marketing blogs the world over.
So when I stumbled upon this site, I was filled with admiration for the daring as well as the passion of its creator. BringBackTheLove is a site dedicated to documenting the risky development of one of Microsoft’s latest campaigns. It is clear that Geert Desager is not only taking risks with Microsoft’s brand, but also his own career. Not only that, the "campaign" appears to be something more substantial than a TVC or two … Geert seems to be shooting a movie. Perhaps the shirt should read "Potential Movie Goer" or "Joost Subscriber".
For those who love behind the scenes details, Geert plays his cards close to his chest … however, they are now in post production, with a plan to launch towards the end of the month. I for one, am hoping to see a few peeks over the coming weeks (who says I am impatient?)!
Oh, and Cam … I think you will find this post particularly interesting!
Normally I don’t go in for long posts … I am not a fan of reading nor writing them — but every now and then a post comes along that just carries you away with it. This one by Paul McEnany is one such post. It returns to a theme that he has been exploring for some time — the changing media environment we live in and the changes it will wreak on the unsuspecting players in that landscape.
Paul writes with an insider’s view on the outside world. He pulls you into his posts with a torrent of ideas and a fusion of images. He makes you feel like you are holding your breath as you read. At the end of the post, you gulp burning air like a drowning man. In this post he ends with "breathe easy …" — just to remind you that oxygen is as important as passion.
Lists are funny things … there have been books about them, about our desire to create, control and manage our worlds — and there are entire blogs devoted to lists. In fact, some of the very first blogs were simply that — lists of links.
In many ways, Google and Technorati are list builders, providing us with a surrogate for creating lists. Del.icio.us is another as is MyBlogLog … and there are many others. And on a smaller level, our own blogrolls are a type of recommendation list.
Within the global marketing community we have Mack’s excellent Top 25 and Todd And’s Power 150, and not to forget, Joseph Jaffe’s fun Most Valuable Blog (and big congrats to BMA).
There are bound to be many other lists that are beyond my ripples of reading covering other category areas. But this morning I got an email for a list that is a little closer to home. Craig Harper has compiled a list of 100 Australian blogs and promises to update it each weekend. I hope it is automated … but it certainly provides me with more blogs to check out — I just don’t have to travel quite so far 😉
OK … I am getting desperate. There are so many topics for me to write about and only so many hours in the day … I am getting deeper and deeper into debt. This could be the only similarity between myself and George W Bush … oh, that and our shared mastery of the English language. But I promise to one day return, in more depth, to these topics:
David Armano continues to storm the barricades between the blogosphere and mainstream media.He has a great article featured over at Business Week. He prefaces the article with the following — "As consumer markets fragment, marketers and designers must understand how platforms evolve and influence human behavior".
This article expands on David’s ideas around the Conversation Economy and the way that it is redefining what we consider "marketing" … of course, it is not about talking to the hand. It’s about talking to the face.
I am becoming increasingly fascinated by the overlap between blogging, twitter, email and instant messaging. There are conversations that happen on all these levels … some immediate, others displaced by time and geography and still others that create sustained and thoughful commentary.
It is great to watch, via Twitteroo (or similar), a conversation unfolding. And in many ways, Twitteroo is facilitating the type of group conversations that you would have in a bar — where you can pay attention to particular speakers, become focused on one or two streams or join an all-in debate. You can also “eavesdrop” on other conversations that your group is having with someone at the next table. Cool. But kind of voueristic.
It was during one such conversation that Ariel Waldman was talking about preparing for an upcoming weekend away. You bloggers out there will know that readers get used to regular updates … and Ariel was lamenting the lack of hours in the day and struggling with the demands of work, life and blogging (like there is any real distinction). I facetiously asked why no one participating in the conversation was volunteering as a guest blogger on Ariel’s Shake Well Before Use blog.
Lo and behold, when I got home to check my email I found a Twitter Private Message from Ariel asking whether I would do a guest spot for her while she is in Seattle. So for the next couple of days I will be plumbing the intersection of “art, advertising, sex and technology” over at Ariel’s blog. Should be interesting for me, but Ariel’s readers may think it is more of a case of taking a walk on the mild side 😉
There have been plenty of milestones over the last couple of weeks. Mack and his Viral Garden turned one as did the astounding MarketingProfs, the mysterious Mindblob returned from his southern hemisphere sojourn and Lewis began injecting more … well, more Lewis, into his blog.
CK hosted a gang of bloggers in NYC, and many of us fell head over heels for Twitter. David Armano unexpectedly morphed into a marsupial, Paul copped some heat on a YouTube post, Tim travelled, returned and travelled again to Taiwan and Cam continued to pump out quality, thought provoking posts that kept us all on the edge of our keyboards. And speaking of anticipation, Sacrum whets our appetite with a sneak peak of an upcoming eBook (see the preview and watch the YouTube video).
There was also the dreadful Kathry Sierra incident, its aftermath, and the excuses, explanations and refusals.
On a more personal blogging note, I unexpectedly reached two milestones today. Just after e-mailing Valeria Maltoni explaining that my goal had not been reached, I found that it had — 500 inbound blog links over the last 180 days. (Thanks to all who link and inspire me.) Also … the 1000th comment — and a big thanks to Drew McLellan for that!
And while much has happened, already we can see the road stretching out in front of us. While I don’t know where it will take us, I know that there is no better group of people that I would like to journey with.
Looks like I will be in Orange County on Friday. I have had a little look around the web but have not seen any coffee mornings posted … anyone know of coffee action in OC?
Let me know if you do!
