Someone’s ripping my design: Part II
Posted Monday, January 29, 2007 at 9:48am in Off topic | 20 Comments
**Sigh**
Someone’s ripping my design again. In May I had the same issue from someone is Russia - this time I think it’s Japan. Seriously there should be (if there isn’t already) some law against stealing other people’s designs. It’s copyright infringement. Nice original name too: “Men’s Items”. If you look at the bottom the guy’s even claiming it was designed by him/her.
**Sigh**
Good guy
Bad guy
technorati tags: thief, criminal, steal, stole, nick, chored, swiped
The newspaper bites back
Posted Tuesday, January 9, 2007 at 8:28pm in Media, Technology | 4 Comments
Nice post by Telegraph.co.uk news editor, Shane Redmond, on how the UK based company, Plastic Logic, has just received financing to build a large scale factory for the production of flexible electronic paper parts - or ‘e-paper’ as it’s probably more commonly known. The company is set to be in production by as early as 2008. “What’s this got to do with anything?” I hear you ask. Well, put it this way, if Shane is right newspapers might be set for a revival.
Imagine if you could hold an lightweight A4 flexible peace of material which could contain all of the day’s newspaper content. Something with enough memory to contain not only the day’s newspapers but a load of your favourite magazines, a couple of novels and a dictionary for good measure too… all in one small place. It would be like the newspaper had just been ipodded.
I think this is the closest technology to good old paper. And let’s be honest, people much prefer reading from dead trees as opposed to a computer screen. I know I do. My focus levels seem to drop when reading online, particularly if the piece is heavy. Plus there’s too many distractions on a computer; too many things are whizzing around and popping up in the corner. You see the email icon… you know you’re gonna read it, you can’t help it. Plus, I’ve never seen anyone reading a laptop 8.30am on the Northern Line. (Northern Line? Oh no, I’m becoming Londonised!)
That said, it will be interesting to see if newspapers make their content available for such devices. What would the business model be? Would I pay a monthly fee and expect to see ads? Or would I pay a more expensive fee without the ads? Could I chop and choose content from paper to paper? I.e. The media section from the Guardian, entertainment from the Sun, Sport from the Star, business from the Telegraph. And how would I sync fresh content to it? Similar to the iPod? If that’s the case then the last thing I want to be doing at 7.30 on a week day morning is turning a computer on to add the day’s news to my epaper. 
Shane mentions that new content could be added via a mobile phone which isn’t too bad I suppose.
It’ll be interesting to see how it develops.
technorati tags: epaper, plastic+logic, shane+redmond, the+telegraph
Innocent Drinks rock
Posted Sunday, January 7, 2007 at 7:30pm in Blogging, Business, Media, PR General | 13 Comments
If there’s one consumer brand that gives me a warm and fuzzy feeling inside it’s Innocent Drinks. Not only do they make exceptional healthy fruit drinks using a variety concoctions, the way in which the company markets itself is nothing less than phenomenal. It’s genuine approach to its customers ensures that I’ll always stick an Innocent carton in my shopping trolley while on the weekly shop.
Innocent obviously doesn’t take itself too seriously. From its vehicles donning quirky signs and animal features to naming its HQ as Fruit Towers to the little notes it leaves on its products like “We promise that we’ll never use…any weird stuff in our drinks. And if we do you can tell our Mums” is simple genius. However, as well as the little quirks, the company obviously has a long term marketing strategy but I still can’t help thinking it’s all done genuinely.
Here’s why:
If you look on the ‘Us’ section of the Innocent website you’ll see that the company started from humble beginnings. The three founders got tired of their regular jobs (in marketing I believe) and were contemplating setting up a smoothie business. Rather than taking what would then have been a huge risk and quitting their jobs without any research, the three founders bought £500 worth of fruit and set up a stall at a music festival in London. Next to the stall they had two bins, one with a YES attached to it and the other with a NO. Alongside this was a large sign saying: “Do you think we should give up our jobs to make these smoothies?” After the smoothies had been sold the YES bin was brimming and the rest, as they say, is history.
It’s a good story no doubt and gives (me at least) a sense of ‘local lads done good’. I never hear stories like this being told in modern business but I don’t understand why? You know how my dad found out JFK had been assassinated? He was at a Beatles concert and John Lennon announced it over the mic. That’s a story. Short, but would I have remembered it if he said he heard about it while watching a darts game in a pub? No.
Story telling captures people’s emotions and makes it memorable for the listener as opposed to telling hard facts. Do you think I’m the first person to tell Innocent’s story? Will I be the last? To steal a Guy Kawaski phrase - Innocent focus on ‘making meaning’ and not ‘making money’.
Innocent Drinks donate 10% of its profits to charity. The company has also created a registered charity called the Innocent Foundation which works in partnerships and NGOs around the world. They don’t fund within the UK but rather to developing countries where their fruit is bought from. Considering Innocent own 60% of the UK smoothie market it would seem that the company isn’t doing CSR for its own reputation’s sake. If CSR was primarily for their repuation’s benefit then maybe they would try to make their ‘good intentions’ more visible within the UK?
Look at the Ethics page of the website (strapline: “We know we aren’t perfect but we’re trying to do the right thing.”) it has a number of different initiatives from recycling to procuring ethically (Innocent pay premium rates for their fruit from farms with the highest ethical accreditation) to ‘doing good things‘.
Combining good community relations with good CSR, Innocent also run Fruitstock, a music festival at Regent’s Park to “say thanks to the people who drink our drinks” which also raises money each year for a designated charity.
I love the Innocent logo. It’s plain, simple but easily recognisable. Along with the brand mantra “little tasty drinks”. Love it.
Taking a leaf out of the Halifax’s book Innocent feature their own employees in their TV ads… well they have once. They also have their own inhouse doctor. Here’s the latest advert. It features the guy that writes the blog.
As well as having the ‘Family‘ section on their website where they send periodic updates of news, invites to events and the odd present, Innocent also have their own blog with unfiltered comments. The use of Flickr for their Mistletoe kissing competition was pretty good too. They sent out 10,000 sprigs and asked people to take photos of themselves kissing to add to the Flickr group. Again, they also used Flickr for their Supergran campaign which was in aid of Age Concern.
Being the new age socially responsible company that it is, it would be great to Innocent empowering its customers similar to what Firefox did with Firefox Flicks. Or like what Firefox did with its advocates names in the New York Times ad. Why spend all that money on huge advertising creatives to come up with an ad concept when they could run a competition among the public to create their next ad. Now that would be something!
To see one of the founders get a slight grilling on the BBC’s Hard Talk click here.
technorati tags: innocent+drinks, innocent+smoothies, csr, customer+empowerment
Edelman grad blog launched
Posted Thursday, January 4, 2007 at 6:17pm in Blogging, PR General | 7 Comments
Another blog from the Edelman stable. This time it’s from the graduates of the London office detailing their foray into the blogosphere and PR in general. The content is a mix of what they’ve been up to on the Edelman Grad Scheme, musings on the media agenda and general topics on life. A first I believe? Do any other agencies have an external grad blog?
Take a look, it’s well worth a read. The about page says: “Despite HR’s best efforts, we’ll do our best to rattle the cage, lift the rug and dish the dirt on all the high-times and hangovers here at Edelman. As you’ll probably have guessed, whilst we’re trying to show you what we do and how the PR machine works, we’ve got our tongues firmly in our cheeks so it should make for an entertaining, as well as informative read. As Mark Twain said – “the public is the only critic whose opinion is worth anything at all”, so feel free to comment, spit vitriol or cry foul at what we write and we’ll do our best to reply, sweetie, darling!”
I’m not sure who wrote that particular part but I’m guessing it was ‘verbal swordsman’, Tom.
technorati tags: edelman, edelman+grads, grad+blog
Relevant, recycled online news
Posted Wednesday, January 3, 2007 at 2:03pm in Blogging, Media, PR General | 9 Comments
Last week I had a brief scan over the Wikipedia entry for my favourite media outlet, The Guardian. Further down the page it has a summary of the newspaper’s ‘online media’ section and mentions that a third of its website’s hits are for articles over a month old. Now think about that for a second. Old (and no doubt outdated) news accounts for a third of the Guardian’s traffic.
The Wikipedia entry links to a piece by Emily Bell (written in the Guardian of course) who backs this up by giving an example of a story which was added to the Guardian’s sister site, The Observer, about missing armed dolphins (not frickin’ sharks with frickin’ lazer beams btw) trained by the US military following Hurricane Katrina.
Bell says: “On the Sunday Flipper appeared in the paper the story won 25,000 impressions; on Monday it attracted a further 484,000; and to date it has picked up 915,000. Once you put a story into cyberspace it acquires a life of its own, well beyond the moment of publication. Flipper was Drudged - that is, he appeared on the US site the Drudge Report, which points people towards the quirkiest and most scurrilous stories on the web. From there one blog after another picks the curious item up and passes it on until the cumulative effect is as great as a major breaking news story.”
It also reminded me of a post written by Antony Mayfield after he had spoke to the automotive industry’s PR group MIPAA. He mentioned quotes from another speaker, the group editor for What Car?, Steve Fowler who claims that the publication gets 900,000+ visitors a week to whatcar.com and 127,000 readers a month to the magazine. “But people still think that the magazine is much more valuable to be in.”
Looking at my own stats this post still drives a lot of traffic to my blog. In fact in terms of hits is the most popular post I’ve written. And even though it was written in mid June, the last comment I received was late November. Google Analytics tells me that people are landing on this particular post using the keywords “public relations campaign”, “pr campaign”, “public relations campaign example”, “steps of a PR program” I could go on. Jeeze, I’m even number 6 in Google.com for people searching using the famous PR theorists, Grunig and Hunt as keywords.
My point is this. News in a dead tree publication is there for, at most, a couple of days. Then it’s off to be recycled and turned into new news. Whereas news online is recycled in a whole different way - it’s a recycling of the same news. Plus it’s searched for (I.e. the eyeballs it comes in range with actually want to read it) therefore making it more relevant to the end user.
technorati tags: the+guardian, online+news, search, recycled+news