Saw this before watching Indy 4 (OK film, but felt slightly ‘empty’ afterwards) the other day. A short animation incorporated into a Mini ad as part of the Mini Shorts/Future Shorts campaign.
(Mini opinion - The ad felt a bit patched together around this piece of creative content rather than blended nicely with it and also, where’s the SEO/keyword bit of the campaign?)
The animation was by a guy called Lev Yilmaz and his home on the web is here. I’ve just spent half an hour or so (procrastinating) checking out loads of his other work at his YouTube Channel. What strikes me is how very human it all is. How just like all the best art, it connects with you as a human being because it is so real and obviously comes from his heart.
Here’s some more of these little movies which touch on loads of things in life like depression, breaking up with girlfirends, seeing your mates succeed in a band that you could have been in and the random conversations you have with your mum.
“The cool guys”
“A typical conversation with my mom”
‘I’m not going to think about her”
There’s also a touch of Lev in the Common Craft videos and the latest Social media one was released last week.
Sorry, yet another link to something from Noah Brier (via TIGS). A good one though. If ever there was an example of ‘do as thy say’ then this is surely it. A while back (thinking about it, because he was in the middle of building this) Noah quite rightly said that a brand is what people say it is, not what you (the marketer/brand owner says it is. Someone else, I can’t quite remember now, recently said a brand is not what you say it is, it’s what Google says it is. Both very true, humans rule.
Brand Tags, a side project by Noah, lets people say one word about a brand and collates these into tag clouds for a selection of brands that you can browse. It really is rather clever indeed and has indeed made the front page of del.icio.us today. Nice one Noah, who I’ve just seen has started celebtags too - this feels like the start of something.
Check out what people say about Apple, eBay and a whole host of other brands (including Starbucks, cropped tags below).
Also worth taking a peek at this presentation which inspired the idea.
Yes, I know . . . another post about Twitter, just like the one before and like so many others right now. But, just wanted to acknowledge this great example of a massive company using Twitter really well as a way of keeping an eye out for customers with problems and doing everything it can to solve them. Enter Frank Eliason from Comcast, who seems to be doing everything he can to help people out. And it hasn’t gone unnoticed either - this post is currently riding high on Techmeme and look what happens if you Google Frank. Also, check out this profile of Frank here. Comcast need a bit of love, given the fact that comcastmustdie.com (blog here) made the front cover of Business Week at the beginning of the year.
Customer service and so-called social media relations/online PR are pretty much inseparable these days don’t you think?
Here’s some of Frank’s latest Tweets, closely followed by a Tweet Cloud giving you an idea of what Frank is tweeting about. Plus a user generated anti-Comcast ‘ad’ just to give you an idea of what Frank is up against.
Marmite has just launched a Facebook group. Now it’s (nearly) always good to see brands getting stuck into things like Facebook and it’s even better to see it done really well - but today I was left a little bit disappointed.
You see, surely a better thing to have done would have been to have created two groups “We love Marmite’ and “We hate Marmite’? That way the two groups - each fuelled by the passion of the people in them - could have battled it out. As it stands (link to group here, actually it’s a Page but there we go) the love or hate aspect of the call to action gets a bit lost in the action. The official Page for Marmite could have been created for ‘true’ fans and used to fuel and update the battle for love or hate across both groups.
Also - I went to the main Marmite site today and there was no mention of the Facebook group anywhere (obvious) to be seen. Again - little bit sad to see that given the fact that they would have known the online coverage would be appearing.
Anyway, I actually love Marmite and am no hater, I just felt compelled to write this as I assumed that the second I read the headline, that’s what they would have done. Wonder why they didn’t or if anyone else has any other ideas? Or maybe I need to worry about something else.
Oh, disclosure - Facebook is a Bite client but then I think I’ve mentioned that a few times so you probably knew that.
Right now, there’s some Do The Green Thing people cooped up in a cold room waiting for people like you and me to go there and give them ‘hugs’. Using a live webcam and a simple chat and ‘big hug button’ interface, you can interact live and see what happens when you type things and press the button. One of those ideas that often comes up in brainstorms - do something live on the web with a webcam and chat - but never ever gets executed. So, really nice to see someone actually doing at and committing to doing it well. When I went in there activity was actually pretty high, judging by the amount of chat going on and they were definitely live because I asked them!
The whole point of the thing is to tie into this month’s Green Thing of using body warmth which you’ll find out all about if you go check out the site.
There’s also a Flash Hug on Valentine’s Day and an active Facebook group too. Here’s the details for the Flash Hug:
February’s Green Thing is: Use Body Warmth (and turn your heating down a bit or off for a bit).
Come to Soho Square* at 1.30pm on Valentine’s Day and be part of the world’s first Body Warmth Flash Hug.
The plan: turn the heating down or off for a bit in your homes or offices, come to Soho Square at lunchtime, hug some beautiful people (or some of the Green Thing team) then go back to your unheated homes and offices with a huge body warmth boost.
Really like the look and feel of Do The Green Thing and it’s great to see a continuous flow of good stuff coming from DTGT HQ. Now I (and you!) just need to go do it this month and every month.
Disclaimer - I know some of the people at DTGT as I used to work with them at Zopa
Having worked with Yahoo! at two agencies across pretty much all of its products (including Search with Ged as a client!), I was a bit sad to hear about the job cuts in the pipeline and read some of the more cutting articles that appeared after the financial results. A lot of people have pointed to the fact that Yahoo! lacks any sort of vision and has yet to deliver a solid product roadmap that gets people all excited about its future again.
Now, I know that really recently Yahoo! revealed it is testing Del.icio.us results being incorporated into Yahoo! Search, but I’m still left with that nagging feeling that I’ve had for months that they are failing to make the most out of what is one of the most essential things on the web for me today - Del.icio.us. Now I didn’t get on board with Del.icio.us until 2006, March 18th to be precise - when I saved my first bookmark, a guide to free open source software on Open Source Mac. But, since then I’ve fed it like a beast and have saved over 2000 links to valuable, interesting stuff. If I lost all of those links I would be really rather unhappy indeed. In fact, I regularly back them up. Not that it would be the same but at least I’d have some record of all those amazing things I’ve found on the net.
Anyway, I’ve digressed a bit. My point is that even though I’d consider myself a fairly heavy user, I never really use any of the other features like saving links for other people or using the delicious network to find links from other people. Instead, I either stumble into someone’s bookmarks after they pop up in search results or go on a bit of a bookmark Safari after checking out someone’s blog that includes a link to their del.icio.us profile. I also think that the only person whose delicious master feed I get over RSS is Lynette Webb at Google (more on Lynette here). Surely that’s a bit odd - am I alone in this?
So the big question. Why doesn’t Yahoo! work more closely with Del.icio.us and integrate it FULLY into the Yahoo! Search experience? Surely, it’s sitting on a goldmine of filtered information - hand selected and saved information from human beings across the planet. Even just a custom simplified big search box start page (crude mock-up above!) that defaulted to searching the del.icio.us network and a better UI for the results would be a start. Just like we’ve learnt with Twitter, the Google homepage and countless other examples (very recently Instapaper too) - simple is best when it comes to the tools used to manage information. Sometimes it’s better to strip back features than serve everything up in one go.
Now that’s just one thing that could be done. There’s heaps of other stuff that I’m sure is possible. I just don’t see whay it’s taking Yahoo! so long. Remember - it was December 2005 that Yahoo! bought Del.icio.us - over 2 years ago. That’s ages in web-time, especially at a time when Yahoo! needs to pull a rabbit out the hat more than ever before.
This is super cool. Still very early days but it’s pretty amazing you can now stream to the world right from your mobile phone. Scoble is all over it and have a feeling that this is the absolute tip of the iceberg.
UPDATE - don’t think the embed code works, have tried a few times.
Updated version of What is social media? unleashed by Anthony over at Spannerworks. Nice to give away something for free, safe in the knowledge that it will help drive new business leads (and you can use bits under Creative Commons Copyright). And ironic given my previous post.
