Category Archives: Marketing & Media

“The Dog ate my twitter account”

Aside

Another day, another ‘celebrity’ or official twitter account claiming they were hacked in response to some poorly chosen posts.

For those whose claims were valid, I can only ask why you haven’t turned Twitter Using login verification yet?

For those who are just making shit up to hide your poor judgement, maybe try something like Bleeply to help you stop screwing up?

Previous guidance to review your connected applications and try changing your Password more often still stands.

Headline with thanks to Gary Stark.

The Bucket List of Technology

Image

1

Samsung's Bucket List of Technology Features for the Galaxy S 4

As I read about the new technology which Samsung have included with their newly announced mobile device, it was obvious to me that they are migrating to a more user focused company from their technical background.The presentations at the launch – most especially the one accompanying this post, however hinted they aren’t yet ready to leave behind the focus on the technology behind the features in their promotions.

Visuals hang around, and are inherently more reusable to illustrate your product than the words written by the technologically savvy for their gadget hungry readership. The attendees at today’s launch were clearly the right audience for the bucket list of technology crammed into the Galaxy S 4, like the example I share, but there is a lot to be said for your imagery to instead focus on simply explaining the key features. One at a time.

Especially when, in order to get the scale you need to be successful, your potential customers are more interested in what they can do with your innovation rather than what it is called or how many audio codecs it supports.

Link

From Groupon’s SEC Filing:

We want the time people spend with Groupon to be memorable. Life is too short to be a boring company. Whether it’s with a deal for something unusual, such as fire dancing classes…we seek to create experiences for our customers that make today different enough from yesterday to justify getting out of bed. While weighted toward the measurable, our decision-making process also considers what we feel in our gut to be great for our customers and merchants, even if it can’t be quantified over a short time horizon.

I’m not a fan of what Groupon are selling, but totally this.

Via Dustin Curtis

“Opening Weekend”

Aside

The Opening Weekend was always the method of measuring consumer excitement for Hollywood Movies. Indeed if you search opening weekend even today you’ll note the focus on blockbusters.

We keep getting told that consumer preferences are changing, a tipping point approaches, but the search results remain the same.

This week the term opening weekend was used by a number of media organisations to describe Apple’s initial sales of the iPhone 5. Couple that usage with the long expected mass-market adoption of alternative methods of consuming entertainment, and I wonder how long before search results for that term change to look more like this?

Robbie Farah was in the cheap seats after all

Posted on by
Reply

Before I wrote about how Robbie Farah might consider a similar filter on twitter to the one he probably needs to apply every time he plays a game of football, I was aware of allegations about a tweet he sent to Australian Prime Minister, Julia Gillard a year ago.

Turns out he’s as much if not more of a hypocrite as you or I:

Others will give you the Social Media Advice posts, I’ll just make the point that unlike certain Newspaper editors in the UK, he seems to have been big enough to apologise. Though as a celebrity of sorts, he probably didn’t have much choice in the matter.

He could go further and ask the bottom scraping media organisation, which said editor once worked for, to call off the dogs in their idiotic and simplistic “stop the trolls” campaign.

Which wonderfully has, to date, included a series of posts from expert contributors. As the reference says, my head is exploding.

Link

You were the ones who saw something meaningful in what others considered stupid and superfluous. You gave Twitter “at” replies and short links and hashtags and everything else that made the 140 character limit just a little easier to deal with. You were the true innovators – not them. But your services are no longer required. Please pack your things and go.

via Curious Rat

Or as Tom Waits might put it;

twitter doesn’t want me today, but I’ll be back tomorrow to play.

 

When the Olympics is all about protecting the brands, is it time to end it all?

Aside

According to The Independent, Britain is about to be flooded with brand police to protect the owners of the Olympics;

Under legislation specially introduced for the London Games, they have the right to enter shops and offices and bring court action with fines of up to £20,000.

Olympics organisers have warned businesses that during London 2012 their advertising should not include a list of banned words, including “gold”, “silver” and “bronze”, “summer”, “sponsors” and “London”.

For the FIFA World Cup in South Africa in 2010, a South African Law Blog wrote:

the Municipality of each host city has in effect become the enforcement arm of a private company

Once the Great in Britain was supposed to refer to its dominance of the entire world. Perhaps this  brand police malarkey and the legislation at national government level to assist it, is the natural progression from Great to Cool to Little.

If, like FIFA’s compromised tournament, this competition has become solely about how much money you can make from companies who then insist you legislate to protect their rights for the duration, what’s the point of the Olympics anymore, actually?