Will Knott

I’m not late yet.

The Tuesday Push for this week is LouderVoice who have just launched a range of business services. This means that you can “white label” your reviews. Or to put it another way, your site features reviews, by your customers, of your products or services, but you don’t have the hassle of creating a reviews platform along with everything else.

All the pain of creating a review system is taken off your hands. You get to define exactly where reviews appear on your site, who can review/comment and how all of that content appears. The effort involved in adding reviews to a site using this approach is very low.

Reviewing is easy, and you can do it by blog post, SMS text, Twitter, Jaiku and even logging in to LouderVoice (how quaint).

You also get a little review and link juice for your site if you want it.

More importantly, LouderVoice is open for more ideas to make things better for you.

Its not just me who thinks they are good, they’ve been short-listed for New Company of The Year by The Irish Software Association.

And if you look very carefully on the LouderVoice, you can see some reviews I’ve done in the past. I think I’ll have to start doing them again soon.

take care,
Will Knott

This post has changed direction several times in the last three days.

At first I was going to write about green issues. What happened was that I bumped in to a pair of representatives for Change.ie, a government run site for creating a plan of action for environmental change and reducing Ireland’s (and maybe the world’s) carbon footprint. I told the reps that I was surprised that there hadn’t been blogger outreach to other blogs concerning green issues, and pointed out a few that I knew of.

One rep asked me to e-mail in the details of the sites, the idea was to get something of an aggregator going.

The first person who came to mind was Ms. Phoebe Bright…

who seems slightly miffed in this photo about what happened next.

Phoebe presented at the recent Open Coffee BBQ about energy, energy demand and a technological solutions to change the thinking currently driving our consumption habits. Well worth a read if you weren’t at teh presentation.

Also, how can I forget Greennav. Actually I did, which is why I e-mailed in the links. Greennav is an odd mix of a group blog in that anyone can add to it. So its one better than an aggregator, is something of a community. And yes its full of green hints and tips.

Even the landscape gardener Peter Donegan has added a collection of green hints and tips to his site.

And now a change in direction.

Ladies and gentlemen. Get them together, as the response from the government sources was “that’s nice, anyone can blog, go ahead”. Or a “we’ll do nothing thank you”.

This is one of those areas where we should collaborate, and double, nay triple the voices to get the messages, and actions out there. A green meme. Not just an internet meme but a get off our backsides and do something about it meme.

I’m just not sure what.

But its this tendency for collaboration which brings me to to the next change of directions, sponsored by Twenty Major and Adrian Weckler.

They have complained about the fact that …

1. We’re not angry and fighting enough. (But Mr Weckler things me are too angry).
2. We aim for consensus
3. We don’t do enough investigative journalism
4. Bloggers seem to be people who are fake

Well lets see.

I know that I don’t intend to ever get close to Granddad without a stab-proof vest, but the Irish blog-sphere is a small place. If you don’t count Bebo blogs, you could fit most of the Irish bloggers in a medium hotel for an awards ceremony. Because we are a small group, the chances of prolonged bickering are few. Grudges can be held, but so can tongues. And the word “community” tends to hold sway. (Besides, Twitter is the place for small short-lived Irish fire fights). And besides, Barcamps, Tweet-ups, Open Coffee clubs, photo-walks and general get-togethers happen enough to prevent full blown flame wars that lead to bits going missing.

As for a consensus. Well, the early Irish bloggers were either techies, or non-technical people in the technology industry (sometimes in the one person). In this world, standards mean a lot. Consensus gets the job done. And could a barcamp exist without consensus?

As for people who aren’t and don’t aspire to be investigative journalists not doing enough investigative journalism for Mr Wreckler’s liking. Well, circular logic only gets you so far. Maybe you would be willing to teach us the way, and teach us, using your blog or course, on how to do these investigations. I think a few hundred well trained (even if we are bored, lonely or angry) bloggers might do you some justice. (Besides you forgot about Maman Poulet teaching journalists how to do their jobs when it came to Michael Lynn).

And finally, “bloggers are fake”. Now he’s not talking about fiction blogs, nor blogs maintained by a fictional (or pseudonymous) character. He’s talking about people who create great blogs, to get employment, and once employed, stop blogging. I can only assume that he means people who want to write for a living, and are using their blog as a portfolio in the same way that an artist creates work for themselves, to get their own style (or voice) and use that portfolio as a way to become a writer.

Well, if they exist, and I actually expect that they do, then more luck to them. If the only reason they wrote was to get someone to pay for the writing, then isn’t it better that they stop blogging?

Can we all agree to that?

take care,
Will Knott

A while back Neville Hobson and Shel Holtz of For Immediate Release said that
a) You cannot design a viral advertising campaign
and
b) All adverts should be viral

This seems like a contradiction, but here goes…

b) first. All adverts should be put online in order to gain the potential of going viral. This seems like a no-brainer. If you want an advert to get maximum exposure, you need to cover all the formats (and have a web site for someone to go to).
There is however a problem.

Right.
Or rather rights.

If your advert (and I’ll assume television here, but this applies to radio) has music, you can get the cheaper rights to cover a small region (say the UK and Ireland, or Australia) or get the more expensive world-wide rights. The alternative is to commission music, but the composer can still negotiate world-wide rights at a higher price.

Then come writers, copyrighters and actors rights. In the case of up-and-coming you can probably get them cheap. Given that you’ll probably want to use phrases and still on your website, I’d advise you to go for the worldwide rights anyway. It’s cheaper than lawyers. Since it is now possible that an advert will run for the rest of time on the internet, you’ll probably need a landing site anyway.

In the case of a well know personality, well then things can get expensive. Thanks to the internet, gone are the days when an A-List actor will appear in an advert on the other side of the world where no one that hires them will see it, because everyone know that the bloody thing will eventually show up online.

Which gives rise to a class of advertising I call “the escapees”. These are adverts that fans (or rather “fans”) have put online by themselves completely independent of the advertisers or the product holders. Personally I suspect that they are slightly ignored for the run of the advertisement in its local market. But the advertiser is legally obliged to start pulling those advertisements eventually.

Which brings be back to a). “Escapees” are adverts that have gone viral despite the intentions on the creators. There are also a class of adverts which are designed to stay on the net.

These “potential virals” were created, at first, because they would not be approved for broadcast (I remember one series of condom adverts where the sexual nature of the adverts more or less guaranteed that they would be online only). Other times a viral is the long version of the advert, a TV spot is 30 seconds… an online advert, or a YouTube clip can go on for much longer.

However a viral advert must be linked to. Word of mouth must be created. People have to care about the bloody thing, either because it’s amusing, or very topical.

You can’t guarantee that an advert will be popular enough to be viral. You can try, but word of mouth cannot be faked for long on the internet. You can’t fool all of the people, because if they aren’t interested nor amused, they won’t tell others

So why am I typing about this… Well, given the number of adverts and wannabe viral adverts that have been crossing my screen, I’ve decided that I’m going to start reviewing them.

Wish me luck (and send me adverts)
Will

tags : For Immediate Release, viral advertising campaign, advert, viral, advertisement, online, Rights, escapee, word of mouth, review