Scene And Not Herd

January 27, 2010

#goals4haiti : Fundraising through social media

With their new found wealth and a great squad of players, now is a good time to be a Man City fan. It’s not always been the case though – I remember cold weekday nights watching City vs Stockport County at Maine road in the aptly-named Gene Kelly stand – a temporary prefab of a stand, so-called because the lack of shelter provided meant that supporters were often left “singing in the rain”.

One thing that has always been constant with City, and I’d like to think more so than other clubs, is the strong community spirit felt between supporters. So when I saw the below tweet last week from Denise (aka @doc1online) who is a fellow City fan and previous attendee of KMP’s inblackandwhite seminars, I felt the urge to respond.

For those who don’t know, 70077 is the official SMS number set up by The Disasters Emergency Committee (DEC) to raise money for aid to Haiti following the earthquakes. The Disasters Emergency Committee brings together the leading UK aid agencies including the Red Cross.

First of all, I thought this was a great idea to support a great cause and raise a bit of cash for a country that really needs it. But with my Social Media marketing hat on I knew that what we really needed to gather interest on twitter was a hashtag.

So I posted this tweet. I wasn’t happy with the hashtag I came up with, #cupgoaldonate. There are two rules to bear in mind for a successful hashtag. It should convey the main purpose of the tweet associated with the tag and it should be as short as possible to allow for addition comments by users who reweet/quote the message.

#cupgoaldonate is too long and doesn’t include any reference to Haiti or DEC which should be the main focus of this activity. I also didn’t want to restrict this to just Man City supporters because hopefully, Man Utd and even other supporters of Carling cup teams or other competitions may wish to pick it up.

Thankfully, a follower called @bluemoon82 delivered the goods and came up with #goals4haiti. From then it only took a few well placed and retweetable messages to high profile and relevant twitter users such as @mcfc @kaiwayne and @decappeal and we were away.

The sting of City going behind was eased when I thought of the money being raised for such a good cause and the last two donations I made for the City goals – believe me – made me even happier.

You can follow and tweet to the hashtag again tonight in the second leg and please do take part. Remember – text GIVE to 70077 to donate £5 every time a goal is scored and tell your friends by retweeting the below message or just by following this link and updating your status.

I’m giving £5 to Haiti @decappeal for every goal scored in the Manchester Derby. Text GIVE to 70077 to donate #goals4haiti

I’ll do a follow-up post after tonight’s match with a round up of the campaign and my thoughts on what is interesting to a fundraising marketer but for now, I’m just going to ask you to get involved. Tonight and for the final – whoever gets through…

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Filed under social media, twitter

Tags: #goals4haiti, carling cup, football, fundraising, haiti, mcfc, social media marketing

September 30, 2009

Battleground Google: Labour vs. The Sun

Today’s announcement that The Sun will be supporting the Tories in the next election has effectively marked the beginning of what will be a lengthy election press campaign. But, unlike ‘79 and ‘97, this battle will be won and lost not in the printed press, but on the web.

The Sun has drawn first blood with the sensational headline “Labour’s lost it”. The online version of this article is juicy enough link-bait to already hit the first page of Google for the search term “labour”.

There it is, at the time of writing, in fifth position (not counting news results). Ouch.

As well as associated articles, dossiers and microsites also to be found on the sun website, they are also using PPC as part of their attack strategy.

The terms labour, labour party and labour conference all bring up one of the following ads linking to the topic dedicated Feeling Blue section of their site.

And they seem to be pre-empting a response by buying up their own name.

It’s not been all one way traffic, though. Labour were pretty quick to respond with their own ad that plays on a pretty emotive anti-sun topic: Hillsborough. I took this screenshot this morning:

The gloves are off.

However, Labour don’t seem to be buying as many or as broad search terms. If they want to compete, they should be buying up all the search terms the Sun is and directly attacking the paper on its own turf. That could require some deep PPC pockets. In fact, as I check now the ad isn’t showing. Has the budget dried up already?

The US presidential election digital campaigns demonstrated the importance of rapid response to on and offline trending topics. In particular the paid search campaigns for both camps had to respond quickly and effectively to online buzz and breaking news. Eric Frenchman, the guy in charge of John McCain’s PPC has blogged about using search for political or news rapid response.

So now it’s the UK’s turn and although I hope the tactics might not get quite as… dubious as in the American election, I think Search and social media will be two areas where the battle will be viciously fought.

Interesting times lie ahead.

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Update: It seems Labour didn’t have anything directly to do with the Hillsborough ads, the Telegraph reports. The ads stopped showing around 2 the afternoon. Either there was a very small budget allocated or they were pulled. Over enthusiastic supporters or plausible deniability? Either way it’s a shame, I’d have liked to see a real scrap!

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Filed under Google, Marketing, Search

Tags: Journalism, Labour, newspapers, politics, The Sun

September 8, 2009

Acrossair iPhone 3GS Augmented Reality browser

One of many Augmented reality iPhone apps that are in the pipeline. I really think that AR represents the future of mobile location-based services.

I want contact lenses with this ability so I don’t miss a drop of metadata that might whizz by!

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Filed under web 2.0

August 25, 2009

The future according to Microsoft

I can’tbelieve I missed this post from Steve Clayton when Microsoft’s Business Division first unveiled this production from Microsoft Office Labs.

It’s Microsoft’s vision of how we will be interacting with technology in 2019 and it’s called… “2019″. I bet MS’s skill at naming things won’t be any better by then.

**update**

Ross has brough this to my attention.

Lulz

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Filed under Technology

Tags: future, Microsoft, Technology

May 27, 2009

Proposition 8 – The Musical

I’d like to write a concise, informative and amusing comment piece about the events in California surrounding proposition 8. Thankfully, those chaps at Funny or Die beat me to it in this video starring Jack Black and John C. Reilly. They say pretty much everything that needs to be said… in the style of an am-dram musical.

“Prop 8 – The Musical” from Jack Black

Excellent. You can follow the furore on Twitter by looking at this twitter search.

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Filed under rants, twitter

Tags: #prop8, California, civilrightsfail, funnyordie, Jack Black, John C Reilly, proposition8

April 17, 2009

Kutcher wins – the video

Further to my last post, Ashton Kutcher has won the race to a million followers. In true web2.0 style he live streamed his victory experience on ustream.

more about “Kutcher wins – the video“, posted with vodpod

KutcherVSCnn.com is the app that delivered the news. He also raised a lot of money for a very good cause, so good on him.

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Filed under twitter, web 2.0

Tags: ashton kutcher, CNN

April 16, 2009

Ashton Kutcher vs CNN – should I care who wins?

At the risk of sounding like Social Media version of someone’s grandad, do you remember the days when Robert Scoble was top of the Twitter charts? Do you remember? You kids don’t know this but at the time his 25,000 followers were blamed for service outages. 25,000 was a lot in those days and Twitter couldn’t handle the load of all his followers looking at his updates at the same time on Twhirl. You won’t remember Twhirl. It was like those “Tweetdecks” that you kids use now but more green and with smaller text.

Ah May 2008. I remember it like it was only last year. How things have changed since then.

The battle for 1,000,000 followers is on.

Currently, the CNN breaking news twitter feed is Top of the Twops (not ‘arf) with 967,979 followers. Hot on the heels of this broadcasting giant is one man who likes to tweet. So which wit, which philosopher, which inspirational human being is deemed so important by the new Twitter masses that he or she has 959,259 followers and is challenging a global news corperation?

Ashton Kutcher.

(Note to self: try, really try not to be snooty)

So now Ashton, aided by Electronic Arts, is campaiging for followers so that he can overtake CNN and win the race to the big one oh oh oh oh oh oh.

Says Ashton:

“When I saw that I was approaching a million and that CNN was too, I thought this was really significant for social media. For one person to have the ability to broadcast to as many as people as a major media network, I think signifies the turning of the tide from traditional news outlets to social news outlets.

“Because with our video cameras on our cell-phones, on our picture cams, with our blogging, with our twittering and our posting and our Facebook accounts we actually become the sources of the news, and the broadcasters of the news and the consumers of the news. We have the potential on this day to turn the tide.”

Ashton Kutcher’s stance as the ‘everyman’ is a bit galling. As one YouTube commenter rather crudely put it:

He’s not the “everyman” you c**t muffin. He’s a fu**ing celebrity. His dumb face is all over every printed media.

Quite. Thanks to interestingperson121 for that quote. I added the asterisks.

I do like the fact that Ashton Kutcher seems to care about social media as well as the promotion he gets out of it. He obviously does all his updates himself and he also gets involved with video blogging on Qik and YouTube and… well I admit it: I dislike him a lot less then I used to. At least I don’t have to watch him acting when he’s on Twitter.

But I don’t really agree with him that his having 1,000,000 followers is a triumph of social media. It’s still a single source broadcasting to many. So it doesn’t matter if that source is CNN or Ashton Kutcher. In fact, if I had to pick one as the only twitter stream I could follow I’d plump for CNN. They really do have a lot of content. That’s why they are a news network.

The point is I don’t have to choose. I can follow as many people as I like and get content from them all. Whether it’s the BBC or a mate from work doesn’t really matter. I pick my crowd from which to source my wisdom.

And you know what? It goes two ways. I can tell people stuff I find interesting. It might be stuff i’ve found on the web or even thoughts that have formed in my own brain.

That’s many to many broadcasting. Throw in a dollop of conversation and that’s social media.

Keep reading →

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Filed under social media, twitter, web 2.0

Tags: ashton kutcher, barack obama, CNN, Scoble, social media, stephen fry, twitter

April 9, 2009

Your personality is CRAP! (Google told me)

This has been doing the rounds on twitter and emails today so apologies if you have already seen it.

Comedy value aside, I think this guy has more to worry about than his business cards.

His name is Joel Bauer; he’s apparently a hugely successful motivational speaker and I’m not about to knock him for that. Although, am I the only one who is a little scared of anyone describing themselves as a ‘motivational speaker’?

Maybe that’s why on his equally hilarious and disturbing website Joel chooses to describe himself as an Infotainer.

For those who don’t quite believe what you have just read, once more with feeling: an INFOTAINER.

Srsly…

Although I subscribe to Seth Godin’s Purple Cow theory that it pays to be remarkable, I’m pretty sure it’s meant to apply to a business as a whole – not just a business card.

In any case, I don’t care how remarkable your business card is, if you convey yourself as having the blended personalities of Patrick Bateman and David Brent – the two most abhorrent characters in the history of fictional businessmen – you’re not going to appeal to me.

By putting so much stock in the business card, that most anachronistic 80s hangover of business tools, Joel has neglected the fact that his website and all his available online video content are conspiring to portray him as a complete arse.

If people want to know about someone they have met, they aren’t going to revisit the ludicrous card they have wedge in their pocket, they’ll Google him. And the returns for Joel Bauer, especially the video returns, make him look ridiculous.

Maybe he can spend the next 25 years picking up the pieces and repairing his online personal brand.

Oh and a usability point: if a card doesn’t go with all the other cards, it goes in the bin.

[Just trying out something sneaky with these links: Tom Knowles Joel Bauer Joel Bauer Joel Bauer Joel Bauer]

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Filed under Google, Marketing

Tags: Google, idiot hole, Joel Bauer, Marketing, personal brand, SEO

April 2, 2009

www.education.edu/education

I’m getting sick of mainstream media reporting on non-stories tenuously associated to the internet just so they can write a headline that contains the name of the current “in” social media application. These headlines work especially well if crowbarred into a story about another hot topic that can be easily sensationalised. The resulting hot topic mash-up is guaranteed to sell papers and give Daily Mail readers something to get all frothy and indignant about.

Over the last couple of years the frequency and ridiculousness of these stories has escalated. Two years ago it was MySpace Thugs Trashed my House or similar and in the last year or so Facebook has been accused of being responsible for identity fraud, economic ruin, murder and cancer.

I was most pleased last month when eight newspapers and one news television channel were forced to apologise and pay settlement charges to a family after running stories describing how a “Facebook party” had gone “out of control” and that gatecrashers had “trashed” the house in Marbella. It came out that the news “journalists” involved didn’t know or didn’t care that the party wasn’t gatecrashed, only led to very minor damage and in any case was organised on Bebo, not Facebook.

The worst example of a paper using a web application to fabricate a story was last month when the Scottish Sunday Express, as Graham Linehan put it so well, won the race to the bottom by describing the impish Internet behaviour of Dunblane teenagers as “shaming the memory” of those who died in the Dunblane massacre 13 years ago. They too were forced to apologise.

This year’s main headline-grabbing SM service is Twitter. So I shouldn’t be surprised that last week a story broke about the upcoming report by Sir Jim Rose that will make recommendations for an overhaul of primary school education. The leaked report features many recommendations including the teaching of health and environmental matters and that certain topics from history, notably WW2 and the Victorian period should not be taught at a primary school level. There is also going to be a recommendation that by the time pupils leave primary school they should be familiar with modern sources of information including blogs, wikipedia, podcasts and twitter. Guess what the headlines were?

Pupils to study Twitter and blogs in primary schools shake-up
The Guardian

Pupils ’should study Twitter’
BBC online

This is a leak from a report recommending the biggest shake up of primary education in 20 years and they focus on Twitter? There of course followed lots of discussion on public phone-ins, panels shows and editors columns about how disgraceful and silly this was. Calm down everyone!

Keep reading →

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Filed under rants, social media, twitter

Tags: Daily Mail, Education, facebook, History, Journalism, politics, twitter