22/03/2010

No Tech Day

Today we’ve launched a project at Rabbit which I’m really excited about – No Tech Day for our charity client Practical Action.

Practical Action do great help-them-help-themselves work using simple and innovative technology in developing countries, for example Play Pump – a water pump powered by children playing… How cool is that?! More info on their projects here.

No Tech Day is particularly exciting for me because it evolved from something that happened to me, a certified gadget addict, over Christmas. My mum was so fed up with me checking my iPhone at the dinner table (don’t judge me – I bet you’ve done it too) that she challenged me to go without the internet for a week. A WEEK. Actually, it was more of a bribe as there was a £200 reward for my compliance.

Before that week, I honestly can’t remember the last time I went so long without email, Google, Twitter, Facebook… even Spotify was banned. It shames me to say it but I found myself involuntarily firing up Tweetdeck, or clicking on Firefox, a good few times before I realised I was having a No Net Week. I remember a conversation with my mum about email, and wondering how people really worked before email. To me, a life without technology is incomprehensible.

Yet for those in the developing world it is a reality. Every day, not just for one day or a week. What’s really struck me about working on this campaign is not the lack of access to what we might call basic technology like toilets and electric lights, but the lack of what you might call ‘work technology’ – computers, internet, phones etc. Because without these, developing countries are limited to the type of work they can do.

Practical Action is the kind of charity I like, and I’m proud to be working with, because there’s no hard-hitting emotional guilt but real, pragmatic answers to specific problems. And of course, being a huge geek, I like their focus on tech!

So you won’t be hearing from me on Saturday as I’ll be doing my No Tech Day. If you’d like to get involved check out notechday.org.

09/03/2010

To (client) or not to (client) – no question

Recently, I was chatting to a friend about a client project I was working on, when my friend stopped mid sentence: “… oh yes, I saw that on Twitter!”

Nothing uncommon there – I often see things my friends are up to on Twitter or Facebook before I talk to them about it in person.

He continued: “I love it when you tweet about your clients. You always put ‘client, brackets‘ is doing so and so. It’s like you want people to know you’re being forced  into talking about your clients. Ha!”

This genuinely shocked me. In fact, I got quite defensive. That’s not the reason at all. There’s two reasons that would never happen.

1. If it’s not worth sharing, I don’t

I’ll be completely honest: unless I believe a project is worthy of sharing I just won’t bother. At Rabbit I hope that never happens, but in the past I have worked on things I didn’t like, or colleagues have asked me to promote projects that I’d rather have my digital heart ripped out and trodden on before I was associated with in public.

2. I always declare an interest

I use (client) to show that I have a vested interest in a project. If a particular brand is paying my wages it just seems dishonest not to mention it. Social media’s about transparency, right? Otherwise I could chat on all day about how great MORETH>N insurance is, or the amazing health benefits of MBT shoes, and you’d be none the wiser that I was being paid to do it (clients, obvs).

On a side note – should agencies charge clients for use of their staff social media profiles? As Mat Morrison has previously written:

“If it’s valuable then clients should pay us to do it. If it’s not valuable we shouldn’t do it.”

I’m inclined to disagree since I think a model for payment in these situations is wide open to abuse and almost impossible to implement. That said, if I was advising a brand on choosing an agency I’d tell them to Google their would-be agency team to see what their online profile is like, as being active on certain networks is as important to online comms as great journalist contacts are to offline (side note on side note:  bmibaby did this to Dirk and I to see if we really were active where we said we were).

So to be clear: if I mention a client project it’s because I like it or I’ve enjoyed working on it, and I’ll disclose an interest for courtesy’s sake. Not because I’ve been asked to, or coerced into it.

You?

05/03/2010

Free Flights, and the Social Media Lion’s Den

I’ve recently been working on a project for one of my clients at Rabbit, low cost airline bmibaby, called Free Flight Follow Friday.

Essentially, it’s a competition whereby you can nominate your friends to win one of three pairs of free bmibaby flights each week by using the hahstag #ffff (that’s right, free flight follow Friday) on Twitter. I can assure you it’s not the crux of our online comms for bmibaby, but it’s the first thing we’ve put into the wild, not only for them, but as Rabbit (having launched a mere 2 months ago).

Competitions on Twitter are hardly new, but many of them have a decidedly spammy edge to them, which we wanted to avoid, completely. It doesn’t do a brand any favours, and as an avid Twitter fan I’d hate to be seen to be cluttering up my beloved Twittersphere with rubbish. See: Anyone who makes you retweet a tweet to enter a competition.

Instead we decided to tap into existing user behaviour, in the form of the Twitter tradition, Follow Friday. Let’s be honest: we all know it’s an ego massage between Twitter friends, I’m certain 99.9% of people don’t actually look through the people being recommended to them. But it is nice to be nominated, and even better when that nomination could turn into a free flight.

I really feel like we entered some kind of social media lion’s den with this – Twitter can be a snarky, pious, cliquey place at times, and in addition we’re wide open to criticism from our competitiors. Yet somehow, so far, have emerged alive! Initial reaction has been great, and I’m looking forward to see it develop organically over the next few weeks.

05/01/2010

Goodbye Cow, hello Rabbit.

Hello, much-maligned blog. Yes, it’s been a while, but I’ve got something to tell you…

Today, something very exciting is happening. The wonderful PR agency I’ve been working at for the last 4 months, Cow, is launching a new online-only agency, Rabbit… and I’m in it!

So it’s au revoir to the Cow jokes (I’m moo-ving on…!) and bonjour, Rabbit.

In all seriousness, I’m totally, massively, excited to be offered such a great opportunity – and relieved that I can tell people as I nearly spoiled the surprise on many an occasion. We’ve had an amazing response from clients and potential clients so far, more work than we knew could fit into a week and more fun than work should legally be.

I mean, check our our pretty new site!

http://therabbitagency.com/

It’s exciting, changing, opportunistic times in PR/marketing/communications/digital now, and I feel like I’m hopping into the right patch to have the pick of the juicy carrot crop.

Go Rabbits…!

28/08/2009

Is there ANYTHING Google won’t put ads next to?

Yesterday news broke that the London Google HQ had caught fire. Thankfully for all Googlers involved (and the safety of the interwebz) no one was hurt – it was a small fire on the roof terrace which started when a tree caught fire during a lunchtime BBQ.

Twitter was set alight (sorry…) with posts, Twitpics, quick quips and speculation, but the comment by @chiefchimpanzee made me laugh out loud.

I fired up Photoshop (Pixelmator actually), emailed my Gmail account a handful of fire-related words, grabbed the contextual ads on the side of my inbox, mashed them onto the original photo and sent my creation into the ether.

Just because it made me giggle.

It seems it made a few other people giggle too – it was picked up by the The Telegraph and Techcrunch

20/08/2009

Posterous’ simplicity, WordPress’ flexibility

Since I started using Posterous I’ve been a big fan of their clean, sleek design. However, having used WordPress to power my blog for the last few years, I’m used to being able to customise my online offering by adding widgets and plugs ins.

I rooted around in the WordPress theme directory to see if anyone had made a theme to look like Posterous, but no joy. So to Twitter:

Help, Twitter!

Turns out the answer is my colleague at Fubra, Andy. He got on the case right away, and in a few days had knocked up the theme that you can see now. It looks like Posterous, but I now have the option to add any widget or plug in I like.

You can grab Andy’s theme for yourself, cheekily named Minimous, here:

http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/minimous

03/08/2009

Worse than Habitat hastag spam? How not to promote your brand via social media

So, during my lunch today I popped on to Facebook to see what my friends were up to.

 In my news feed, I spot this:

This has got to be one of the worst attempts at brand promotion via social media that I’ve discovered first hand. Silverberg Opticians’ comment is totally irrelevant to Mike’s status. This is tantamount to spam.
 
In a way, I think it’s worse than the Habitat Twitter hashtag spam debacle, because in order to for them to post this Mike had to become a friend of Silverberg Opticians (their profile is not a fan page) to grant them the permission to comment on his status. They are abusing the fact that he’s let them into his profile.
 
They might as well track him down in the pub and start trying to sell him glasses while he’s mid estate-agent-bashing with his mates.
 
On a practical note, even if Silverberg Opticians’ comment was relevant, they still haven’t maximised the effort they’ve gone to to make a comment. They’ve put a link to their website, but apparently don’t know that if they want people to be able to click directly through from their comment (which would undoubtedly boost the number of visits as a result of their ‘marketing’) then they need to include the ‘http://’ Without that Facebook (and Twitter for that matter) will just treat it as any other text.
 
And don’t even get me started on the multiple exclamation marks!!!
 
I can’t think on anything positive about what they’ve done, apart from the fact that they’re trying. But is a half-hearted or misguided attempt better than none when you’re invading online personal space?

22/07/2009

Screen casting, video editing and iMovie hell

For the past few days I’ve been working on creating an overview video for Clear Books – an online accounting software system, and one of the companies that Fubra have invested in.

When we decided to do the video I got really excited… “Yes!” I thought. “This is what I’m good at!” I did a fair bit of video editing as part of my broadcast journalism degree, so I assumed it would be a doddle, and fun.

Wrong.

It turns out that actually, editing screen casts together is much harder than filming real people and cutting that up. All the tricks you use to keep viewers entertained go out the window. Couple that with the fact that I had to learn to use ScreenCast (pretty straightforward, definitely recommended) and iMovie (tricky when you’re used to the extra features of Final Cut/Premier Pro) over night, and throw in a ton of technical anomalies just for fun, and I nearly threw my beloved MacBook out the window on several occasions.

It’s not perfect, but it’s the first in a series of versions of it, and I hope each will get progressively better. But for now, here it is:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Oze1rFWqlw

Posted via email from Louise’s posterous

20/07/2009

I dun some writings

I’m trying to get back into writing. Non work-related stuff I mean. I used to do a lot of music writing, but it all kind of fell by the way when I was hit by the dazzling bright lights of PR.

But I want to start again. So, with that in mind, a while back I contacted the wittiest music blog around, MyChemicalToilet.com, to offer myself up as a reviewer (free gigs FTW!). I’m pleased to say that the fruits of my first labour, a gig review of… well, an interesting night, have been published today.

“Once inside it became clear that this wasn’t some shoddy, lazily-organised corporate wank-off for social meeja, internet-y types. Aside from headliners Pet Shop Boys, Little Boots and Hot Chip there were mixology lessons, a digital graffitti wall, a fortune teller, X-rated bingo and a tattoo parlour for punters to get a semi-permanent reminder of the night. Mine (a classy rose on my left breast) turned out to be rather more permanent than I expected, still very visible at the gym the next day despite hours of scrubbing.”

The full post is here:

http://mychemicaltoilet.com/can-you-gig-it-smirnoff-experience-ur-the-night-feat-pet-shop-boys-little-boots-matter-the-o2-10709/3853#more-3853

It reminded me of some of the other things I wrote that are still lurking around on the interwebs… Some bits for Men’s Health:

Book Review: The New Erotic Photography
Book Review: Do it Yourself/
Book Review: I’ll Be Watching You

(Yes, the top 2 are basically porn, but it was so they could use the pictures online and bring in web traffic… sigh…)

And some stuff for the excellent music/lifestyle mag LeftLion in Nottingham (my uni days):

Album Review: Chemically Imbalanced by the Ying Yang Twins
Album Review: Concrete Jungle by Ch’ill Crew

And hopefully more on the way…

Posted via email from Louise’s posterous

17/07/2009

Posterous and WordPress – the test

I’ve recently signed up for a new, free service, Posterous.com.

It’s basically blogging, via email. All the cool kids are using it these days, and not one to be left out, I’m giving it a go.

It doesn’t (yet) have the customisability that WordPress does, since you can’t change your theme or add plug ins, but its a great simple design. Check mine out:

http://louisedoherty.posterous.com/

Ok, so it’s a little sparse, but the thing that really appeals to me is that it can auto-update a number of other services. With just an email! I’ve linked my Twitter, Facebook, YouTube (not that I’ve used that yet) and WordPress.

So here’s hoping – this is me, blogging on www.louisedoherty.com, by sending an email.

Posted via email from Louise’s posterous

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