UK’s Revolution magazine focuses on digital marketers and agencies, have published a light hearted but telling survey for companies who may be thinking about the depth of the relationship they have with their own agency.
Although the ‘test’ is written for marketers and it is about digital agencies, it is a great thought starter that can be applied to any client and agency discipline.
So go on, take the test here - because in the current economic climate, it may help to reassure you that your relationship is ok, or confirm that it is time to start divorce proceedings.
Recently launched, Google Profiles are like online interactive business cards letting you share your details with other Google users. With a Google profile, you can easily bring together your web content and social networking links into one central location. You can set up your profile to include, links to your blog, online photos, and other profiles such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and more. It’s not perfect, but the big plus is if someone is searching on Google for you by name, your linked details will appear at the bottom of the Google Search page, complete with a thumbnail picture of you.
Once clicked, they get taken to your full profile – see below
So, why do I say that Google Profiles are almost here?
Although more than 700 Kiwi businesses and people already have their profiles on Google, as of today they still can’t be directly accessed from www.google.co.nz, our default Google page.
Apparently, Google Profiles will be coming to New Zealanders soon but in the meantime, if you can’t wait to set up your own Google profile you can always go here and do it.
Nothing - numerous psychologists know enough about human behaviour to manipulate and engage people.
Unless you’ve been living under a rock in the last 8 days, you’ll know about, and have viewed the clip from last weekend’s ‘Britain’s Got Talent’ episode. This online video is now arguably the most watched online video clip ever – recent estimates state that the incredibly talented Susan Boyle has had nearly 50 million views in a week – this is based upon the number of people who have viewed the clip on YouTube and other online video sharing sites. Read the rest of this entry »
We all know that the industry’s music charts are notoriously unreliable and irrelevant in this age of digital music and global digital citizens.
For a start, there is no ‘standardisation’ between competing chart compilers and channels within the same country, let alone on an international basis.
In the physical world, charts are built on shipped albums. Online, traditionally, they have been a count of digital downloads and while under the traditional economic model, ‘sales are king’, it could be that in this era of networked global communities and illegal downloads, the measure of a band’s influence and buzz is an even richer vein to tap into.
This is where We Are Hunted comes in. They pitch themselves as the music chart for the digital generation and generate their 99 most popular songs online each day.
The We Are Hunted charts’ point of difference is that it tracks sentiment, expression and advocacy relating to particular songs. In their words “We aggregate social networks, forums, music blogs, Torrents, P2P networks and Twitter to develop a daily chart of the most popular songs online”.
A chart based upon ‘buzz’ and the amount of conversation a song has generated means that you can be exposed to songs, bands and genres that you may not ever come across across if you just rely on your own local radio stations.
Is it going to help these bands sell their songs? Well, some of these artists will be exposed to a whole new global audience and that has to be helpful, not only for music sales, but also for getting live audiences when doing overseas tours.
Check out We Are Hunted and if you like any particular song you come across, you can buy it by clicking through to iTunes.
Described as a way of “generating word clouds from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text”.
There are three ways of doing it – you can paste in your own words or a passage from a book; or enter the url of any blog that has an Atom or RSS feed; or finally, enter the del.icio.us user name of anyone and see their tags as clouds.
I ‘created’ the example above by merely pasting in the url of this blog and hitting ‘Submit’. You can choose from a variety of fonts, layouts and colour palettes. Very cool and very addictive!
So, what do I have against Twitter? Nothing. Nothing at all. That’s right, I think Twitter is terrific, and micro-blogging is here to stay.
What I do lose patience with is some of the people who have been bitten by the Twitterbug. Some people just don’t get it. It is too easy to clog up the feeds coming through onto other people’s mobiles and pc’s with inane tweets.
On top of the usual online places I use for pics and other low level documents, I needed access to a relatively secure storage option online. Something that would allow me to upload various files, including video clips, and that I can retrieve as and when I need them from wherever I may be. It would also be useful to be able to allow access to certain designated files, via a password system for other people. It also needed too be simple and as easy as saving / retrieving files on my own computer, while still being available from other PC’s. I did a bit of online research and explored a few options before settling on Dropbox.
This is ideal for my needs, as it ticks all my requirements for simplicity, flexibility and mobility, and provides a decent level of security as all data is transferred over SSL and encrypted with AES-256 before storage.
From a fledgling business running off a young Sam Morgan’s PC 10 years ago, to New Zealand’s biggest and most successful website business today, TradeMe has gone from strength to strength.
TradeMe is an online auction site where goods are auctioned directly by members to other members – an NZ versionof eBay, but with a huge marketplace of local traders.
My partner and I had a really good night at TradeMe’s 10th Birthday bash. They’d booked out the Embassy Theatre, laid on finger food & drinks prior to a screening of hand-picked short films from the 48 Hour Film Festivals and NZ Film Commission. After the screening, yet more food, drink and a live band. There were hundreds of people there, and strangely, most of us knew each other proving that in NZ there’s a lot less than 6 degrees of separation!
Anyway, thanks to all the good people at TradeMe for a fun, relaxed evening.
Yesterday I spent the afternoon judging entries for the upcoming CAANZ (Communication Agencies Association of NZ) Media Awards.
I was one of the judges of the finalists in the ‘Integrated Media Campaigns’ category, and it was a tough assignment.
What I found really encouraging was the high standard of all the finalists, across a multitude of categories, but especially those entries from FMCG integrated media campaigns – traditionally, a terribly ‘unsexy’ category.
Can’t say any more other than although we are a small country, the entries I saw showed that NZ continues to punch above it’s wait in marketing comms strategy.
UK’s Revolution magazine focuses on digital marketers and agencies, have published a light hearted but telling survey for companies who may be thinking about the depth of the relationship they have with their own agency.
