As friends and colleagues will testify, I hate the word viral with a passion. I’ve lost count of the number of press releases I’ve received saying, “We’ve produced a viral.” No you haven’t you’ve produced a video that you’re hoping lots of people will watch. And as for being asked, “Can we get this going viral,” the answer, obviously, depends on the strength of content.
But when a viral’s done well, it’s hard not to be impressed and the new viral marketing campaign for the new Batman movie, The Dark Knight Rises, is very cool indeed.
“Fans had to work Friday morning to reveal the first official image of Bane from The Dark Knight Rises. Along with Thursday’s unexciting press release announcing the beginning of production on Christopher Nolan‘s highly anticipated third part in his Batman trilogy, The Dark Knight Rises, Warner Bros. also launched the film’s official website www.thedarkknightrises.com. Originally, if you clicked over there, it was just a black image with some really weird chanting. A fan was able to look at the visual spectrum of that audio file and in it was…a Twitter Hashtag. You can’t make this stuff up. The hashtag, #thefirerises, when tweeted, slowly revealed, pixel by pixel, some kind of image on the site.”
Very clever. Not only does it get the fan community interested, it gives them a reason to Tweet the hashtag, as there’s a reward at the end of it, even if that reward is just an early advance publicity shot. It’s a win-win situation that clearly knows the audience it’s aimed at and, playing to that, lets the community take a slight bit of control.
But then Warner Brothers have an excellent reputation for this sort of thing, so you’d expect nothing less. It’s clever, inventive and shows a level of understanding way beyond just sticking a video up on YouTube.
And it works. I’m a big Batman fan and, while I know it’s just a picture, it’s Bane! Bane! You have no idea how excited this has made my inner geek.
I absolutely love Stewart Lee. His Comedy Vehicle on BBC Two is one of the funniest things on TV. He’s also excellent at neatly skewing any particular area he turns his attention to. And his piece one online marketing bod trying to make the Stewart Lee brand more in-tune with social media is hilarious.
Having sat through several meetings and pitches that have gone along similar lines, I’m tempted just to whip out this video rather than spend half an hour explaining why certain social strategies won’t work.
September 4th. Mark that date in your calendar. There’s no Premier League or Championship football that day due to the international break, while England play the night before.
A football free weekend, right? Wrong. There’s still hundreds of non-league matches being played up and down the country that day, and James Doe has come up with a fantastic idea to support them.
James has declared September 4th Non-League Day and is urging football fans who’d normally watch a higher league game that day to head to a non-league match and show their support for grassroots football.
It’s a fantastic campaign and one that’s so simple you wonder why it’s never been done before.
As somebody who got rather fond of non-league during Exeter’s time in the Conference and still watches the occasional non-league game, I think it’s a cracking idea.
It’s also a great way to reacquaint yourself with the real heart and soul of football, especially if you’re in any way disillusioned with Premier League football. Who knows, you may even get the non-league bug.
Ironically, I can’t make it to any game that weekend due to a longstanding prior commitment, but if you’re in footballing limbo that day, pop down and support your local club.
You can follow James on Twitter (@non_league_day) or sign up to the campaign on Facebook. And if you fancy going to a game but aren’t sure where to head to, feel free to leave a comment here, along with your location (roughly), and I’d be happy to suggest a game for you.
What’s really impressive is the twofootedtackle podcast’s co-nominees. EPL Talk and World Soccer Daily are pretty good, but Football Ramble and especially the Guardian’s Football Weekly are the dons of the football podcasting world. I suspect anybody starting a footballing podcast has Football Weekly in their mind when they do so.
Essentially, Chris and I are two people who host a podcast in our spare time. Said pod is less than a year old and has a relatively modest number of regular listeners. To even be in the same company as those on the list is a real delight and one I think Chris and I are still a tad surprised by.
I know we’ve not won (and I don’t in a million years expect us to do so), but I’d like to say a few words of thanks to a few people as just getting to the list is an achievement. First off, to Chris for being a great co-host and always coming up with fresh ideas, to Porter Novelli for letting us borrow their studio each week, and, most importantly, to every single one of our guests on the podcast.
Seriously, it would be nothing without the variety of opinions we get from you all, and it’s genuinely enjoyable to head into the studio each week not knowing where we’ll be heading on our footballing chat journey.
At this stage you’re probably expecting me to jump up and down and implore you all to vote for us, but I find that all a bit embarrassing (and a tad egocentric. And frankly, I don’t need any extra help to sound like a tosser at the best of times).
What I will say, though, is if you listen to the show and really like it, then please do press the button next to our name. But only if you genuinely think we should win. The rest of the list is populated by great podcasts, so I seriously won’t be offended if you think they’re better (as they probably are).
Yes, I’m still on a sabbatical, but wanted a quick mention of Google Wave, which I finally got round to signing up after having the invite sit in my inbox for a week.
First impressions… yes, well.
On one hand, I like it. There’s a lot of potential there. In term of work collaboration it could be very useful indeed – kind of inbetween a wiki and email. Certainly for small group based projects with plenty of distance between them there’s a lot a potential. I think Chris and I can both see it working with the twofootedtackle podcast as well.
On the other hand: what the hell do you actually do with it. About 75% of my Waves are currently conversations with other people as we try to figure it all out. I’m also not a fan of the lack of an ‘undo delete’ option (unless I’ve just not found one).
At this stage it’s a bit pointless jumping on the naysayers bandwagon or the sliced bread enthusiasts bandwagon. With the fanfare of the announcement and launch, it was always going to be a tad underwhelming (especially as it can’t actually slice bread). But that doesn’t mean it’s pointless or rubbish. We just probably haven’t found the best usage for it.
Not that I necessarily think it’ll have the same impact as Twitter, but there were similar comments around Twitter when that first started to enter the public consciousness (although it’s worth noting that Twitter is one hell of a lot easier to master than Wave). Twitter, and indeed Facebook, are now quite different beasts from when they first started out.
Wave, I suspect, will be the same. There’s probably some incredibly clever usage of Wave that will be developed a year or so down the line that will make users wonder how they ever lived without it. Or it may die on its arse. But the former’s probably more likely.
Interestingly, there’s a couple of people in my Wave contacts who have very little to do with social media. The industries they work in (mostly the financial sector) may just find more of a use for it. Just because the early adopter / social media sector have jumped on it, doesn’t mean it’s the sector to get the best usage out of it.
Me, the best thing I can see with it so far is sharing and altering recipes and food pictures. That’s been kind of fun. Live Wave cookalong anybody?
Anyway, if any readers of this blog (all 7.5 of you) want to add me on Wave I can be found at garyllewellynandrews [at] googlewave [dot] com.
Occasionally a service pops onto the internet that’s just brimming with potential for journalism (and the rest of the media). It doesn’t need any complicated explanations – you just plug and go and start having a lot of fun. Audioboo is one of those services.
Ostensibly it’s a very simple app for the iPhone that allows you to record a ‘boo’, which gets sent to the Audioboo website, where there are also the standard social networking functions. You can also embed it into your own website. This boo can literally be anything, but it’s normally short and snappy – rarely over two minutes. It’s a bit like an aural version of Seesmic or Twitter, although that’s not entirely accurate.
Let’s backtrack to when I was a radio reporter. It’s not a million miles away from what I would be doing for assorted news stories – often standing near a breaking news story (usually in a cold and/or wet place. Big news stories always seem to break when the elements are at their worst, just to torment news reporters) with a microphone in hand, describing what was going on for the benefit of our listeners.
Depending on what equipment was available on the day you’d either get a radio quality OB unit (although this would inevitably decide not to work or be in use when big stories broke), a mobile phone, or you’d just end up doing an ‘as live’ report into your recording equipment.
This is why Audioboo excites me. The quality, as far as I can tell, is decent – certainly better than using a mobile. Sure, it has limitations – you can’t do a two-way, for example. But the principle of just sending a quick report of where you are and what you’re doing… hell, that’s no different from standard radio journalism and opens up a wealth of possibilities.
If I were still in radio, I’d be getting onto our technical and website bods to make sure we could send Boos direct to the newsroom. How liberating would it be if you can send an immediate report back in decent quality without having to do a pre-record or even take up precious time from the journalist at the other end who’ll be recording your call.
And if a radio journalist found themselves somewhere without any recording equipment (maybe during off-duty time), it’d be easy to get a report back to the office.
But Audioboo goes way beyond that. Citizen journalism is usually, these days, a fairly vague term that’s just used to lump ‘the internet’ together but in this case it suits Audioboo perfectly. If newsrooms encourage listeners to send in their ‘boos’ from news stories, there’s a whole wealth of material that can be collected freeing up precious time for the journalist (and please God, meaning that we have to do less vox pops. I’ve yet to met a journalist who enjoys vox popping. That said, there is a time and a place and they do make for good radio).
Then there’s the radio shows themselves. Audioboo can add another easy, interactive aspect to any DJ’s show, or any podcast as well (it’s certainly something I’d like to play with in the future for the twofootedtackle podcast when I get a moment). Given how simple it is, there are so many possibilities.
Of course, it’s not just radio journalists this can be useful for. It should be reasonably easy to work them into TV news (I’d imagine), and the Guardian have already shown how any news website can work them into coverage. Again, any newspaper – be it national, regional or local – should be looking to work this into their site.
Inviting ‘boos’ from the public is essentially opening up audio is the same way camera phones and the like did for pictures, and that’s now a staple part of any news coverage.
The only downside. I don’t yet have an iPhone so can’t Audioboo myself. But it’s a concept that really excites me and it’s been a long time since I’ve said that about any web service, no matter how much I love or use them.
Not around my waist, although I have recently gone up a trouser size.
So, in addition to this week’s Soccerlens column, which is mainly on Burton Albion’s title wobbles and includes references to Wilde and an impotence joke, there’s exciting news on the assorted football stuff I do.
As from next Tuesday (hopefully), my good friend Chris Nee and I will be producing the Two Footed Tackle podcast. Which is essentially chat about football, but hopefully an entertaining chat about football.
It’s not like this was planned. We’d both chatted about various podcasts we liked, he happened to mention he may have access to a radio studio, I mentioned my broadcasting background, and at that point we thought “why the hell not”.
It’ll be fun to get behind a broadcast desk again and even more fun to chat football for 40-odd minutes.
It’s very much a communal effort and we’ll be reviewing the big stories on the blogs as well as the papers, plus we’re hoping to get some guests, bloggers and general football fans, in the studio to counterbalance our witterings. Should be fun.
At some point in time, I should also be contributing (hopefully) to the excellent Soccerlens podcast, which is a couple of episodes old and a very good listen indeed. It’s also different to the one I’ll be doing with Chris, so you don’t get football fatigue.
It also means that all three of you who missed my dulcet tones after left the newsreading business will be able to get, um, aural pleasure from it again.
What you’ve been saying