Saturday 17 December 2011
Thursday 15 December 2011
Tuesday 13 December 2011
Design and Sell Your Own Converse
A new Facebook campaign out of Anomaly London for Converse adds a twist to the social shopping experience. The Made by Facebook app, an extension of the brand's "Create" campaign, appears as if it is going to let fans design their Converse, sell them to friends and even open their own storefronts.
According to Anomaly CD Nathan Cooper on his Rubbishcorp blog, many companies do "social shopping" on Facebook by simply dropping their shops onto the platform and not bothering to engage users as possible salespeople for the brand.
Converse has millions of fans, plus a Create platform that lets them design their own shoe. "So what if you were to enable people to sell the shoes they design to their mates on Facebook in return for stuff, like free shoes?" Mr. Cooper writes.
Converse is recruiting fans to try the experience.
Thursday 8 December 2011
Wednesday 7 December 2011
Tuesday 6 December 2011
'Grey's Anatomy' Credited for Saving Life Girl says she learned CPR from the hit ABC medical drama.
ABC’s medical drama Grey’s Anatomy presents interesting and strange medical cases every week for viewers, but it turns out the show may have also taught two girls in Wisconsin how to save a real life.
Two girls saved a Sheboygan mother's life by using CPR, which they say they learned from watching Grey’s Anatomy.
When Kandace Seyferth, 36, suffered severe asthma attack and became unresponsive, her 10-year-old daughter Madisyn Kestell and a friend, Katelynn Vreeke, called 911 and then administered CPR. The two girls later said that they learned these life-saving moves from watching Grey’s Anatomy.
"Me and my mom watch the show every Thursday, and I learned it from there," Madisyn told The Sheboygan Press.
Madisyn performed mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, while Katelynn, 12, pounded on Seyferth’s chest.
Sheboygan Fire Department personnel arrived about four minutes after the 911 call to take Seyferth to the hospital. "They [the emergency response officials] pretty much said if Maddie didn't do — remain calm and call 911 and do what she did — I wouldn't even be here to talk about it," said Seyferth.
Seyferth, who developed asthma due to lung damage from a severe case of pneumonia, went upstairs to get her inhaler on Friday after she began having trouble breathing. However, she collapsed when she got back down to the bottom of the stairs. Seyferth said she was very proud of the way the girls reacted.
"You have no idea how proud I am," she said. "I can't believe it. I'm in shock."
Why is British public life dominated by men?
In a typical month,78% of newspaper articles are written by men, 72% of Question Time contributors are men and 84% of reporters and guests on Radio 4's Today show are men. Where are all the women?
I don't know when the breaking point came. Was it the 2010 election, in which the most prominent women on the national stage seemed to be the leaders' wives? Was it a drip, drip, drip of Question Time panels featuring one woman alongside four men and a male presenter? Could it have been the low growl of voices waking me each morning on the Today programme, or a growing feeling that I hadn't seen a female byline on the cover of some newspaper sections for weeks? Was it images of the Commons? Images of the Lords? Was it the prime-time television comedy shows with their all-male panels? Or the current affairs shows, also apparently aimed at a mixed audience, that barely featured women?
It was all those factors, in truth, and so in mid-June I began a count. I started with bylines (the name of the journalist who has written the article). For four weeks I counted every byline in the Monday-to-Friday editions of seven newspapers, looking at the number of male and female writers. I knew there were only two female editors of national newspapers: Tina Weaver at the Sunday Mirror, and Dawn Neesom at the Daily Star. But I wanted a clearer picture overall.
I did the count for the first two weeks, a colleague did the third, and two researchers the fourth. We doggedly counted each byline, in every part of each paper, and while this wasn't a scientific study, each individual week brought forth broadly similar figures (the count was timed to end before the start of the school summer holidays, to avoid any skewing of the statistics). There wasn't a single day, on a single newspaper, when the number of female bylines outstripped or equalled the number of male bylines. The Daily Mail came the closest of any newspaper to parity on Monday 27 June, when its contributors were 53% male and 47% female – reflecting the fact that, whatever the Daily Mail's style and tone, it clearly recognises the commercial importance of its women readers, targets a mass of material at them, and is rewarded as the only daily national, besides the Daily Express, whose female readers currently outnumber male readers.
At the end of the month we averaged all the daily percentages and the results were: the Mail, 68% male bylines, 32% female; the Guardian, 72% male, 28% female; the Times, 74% male, 26% female; the Daily Telegraph, 78% male, 22% female; the Daily Mirror, 79% male, 21% female; the Sun, 80% male, 20% female; and the Independent, 84% male, 16% female. (A new editor was appointed at the Independent during the count, so we had another look at the paper's bylines on the week beginning Monday 14 November, to see if there was any change. Although the paper has some excellent female columnists and writers, the figures were exactly the same.)
It is arguable, of course, that counting bylines is a blunt tool – that an analysis of how many words by male and female writers are appearing in the newspapers would be far better. If someone intends to do that analysis, I would love to read it. However, having leafed through many news, sports and arts sections with a very small proportion of female writers, I'm not sure the result would be all that different. I should also note there were sometimes a few names that weren't easy to pin down as male or female, however much we searched for details, (I'm speaking, primarily, of people called Chris), and these were left out of the count. Their number never exceeded five on a single newspaper on a single day, and that was anomalous – mostly there were fewer than 15 unclear bylines across all the newspapers over the space of a week, out of more than 3,500 bylines in total. So while they might have added a blur to our snapshot, it was of a very mild variety.
During that four-week period, I also logged the gender of reporters and guests on the Today programme. (All the shows I looked at, including Today, were on the BBC, which reflects the agenda-setting nature of the corporation.) It is well-recognised that the main roster of Today programme presenters is male-dominated – John Humphrys, James Naughtie, Evan Davis and Justin Webb, with Sarah Montague the only woman. But I wondered whether this 80/20 split spilled over to its other contributors.
Using the breakdown of each morning's programme, published on the BBC website, and discounting the lead presenters, I added up the number of reporters and guests who appeared on each episode – counting each reporter only once if they were, for instance, appearing repeatedly on a single show to relay the business or sports news. On Tuesday 5 July you had to wait from 6.15am until 8.20am to hear the one female contributor who appeared alongside the 27 male contributors on the programme: arts correspondent Rebecca Jones talking about the Hampton Court Palace flower show. Overall, across the month, discounting the main presenters, Today had 83.5% male contributors and 16.5% female ones.
I spoke to the editor of the Today programme, Ceri Thomas, on Friday 11 November – a day when only two female contributors appeared on the programme. The day before there had been just one. I asked if there was a strong enough female presence on the show at the moment. "I think nearly every day there is not," he said. "And within the programme it's a very active discussion. And not just a discussion – it's pursued actively, too. Every producer on the programme is aware we're trying to increase the representation of women on air. People such as the planning editor, who is in a position to do a bit more about it, have it as a specific objective." He adds that the show's listenership is about 50/50 men and women, "and I'm bound to say to you, it almost never comes up as an issue from the audience ... I suppose it might be two letters a year, or something of that nature." He makes this last point, in different words, three times in our 10-minute conversation.
Gaddafi death footage not too graphic for TV, rules Ofcom
Footage of the former Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi badly injured shortly before his death was not too graphic to broadcast despite hundreds of complaints from viewers, media regulator Ofcom has ruled.
Ofcom said on Monday that it would not investigate complaints about the coverage, which included footage of the wounded, bloodied and beaten dictator moments before his death on 20 October and other video and photographs of his body after he died.
The BBC alone received 473 complaints after the images were broadcast on its rolling news channel and main BBC1 bulletins in the week after Gaddafi's death, of which 197 were in the first 24 hours. A further 136 complaints were made to Ofcom about coverage on Sky News, ITV News, Channel 4 News and al-Jazeera.
Sky News prompted the most complaints to Ofcom, according to the regulator's broadcast bulletin published on Monday.
Ofcom received 58 complaints about Gaddafi footage on Sky News on 20 and 21 October. Coverage on BBC1 and the BBC News Channel prompted 35 complaints to Ofcom on both days, and hundreds more complained to the corporation itself.
ITV News footage saw 29 complaints to the regulator, Channel 4 News prompted seven, and al-Jazeera prompted one complaint.
A spokeswoman for Ofcom said the regulator had decided not to investigate after it found that the broadcasts of Gaddafi's final minutes were "appropriately limited both pre- and post-watershed".
Mary Hockaday, head of the BBC multimedia newsroom, defended the corporation's use of grainy and unverified pictures of Gaddafi's body on the day after his death, saying it was editorially justified to convey the scale of the "dramatic and gruesome" events.
Like most major news organisations in Britain and overseas, newspapers also published the unverified pictures on their websites and in print on 21 October.
The Sun's front page carried a blown-up picture of a battered Gaddafi under the headline "That's for Lockerbie. And for Yvonne Fletcher. And IRA Semtex victims" on the day after the former dictator's death. The Guardian's front page had the same picture, with the headline "Death of a dictator".
Friday 2 December 2011
Five Tips for Driving Word-of-Mouth -- No Matter What Your Product Is
Is there a formula to making a product conversation-worthy? And more importantly, is there a way to keep that conversation going over time?
Wharton School of Business marketing professor Jonah Berger and doctoral student Eric Schwartz took on this challenge with their recent study, "What Drives Immediate and Ongoing Word of Mouth." The study examines the psychological drivers of word-of-mouth for products, based on data from hundreds of BzzAgent social-marketing campaigns. They explore why people talk about products, how product discussions differ online vs. offline and the actions companies can take to generate more product buzz. Here's what they found.
Products Don't Have to Be Interesting
Conventional wisdom holds that consumers will only talk about cool, new products they find interesting, and talk about them in a way that will be beneficial to their social currency. Berger and Schwartz characterize this as online behavior—in digital settings, consumers are more aware of being watched by peers and, therefore, are motivated to post about brands that will be well-received by others. They call this "motivated transmission." (Klout score, anyone?) And yes, the study has a methodology for identifying "interesting" products.
Conventional wisdom holds that consumers will only talk about cool, new products they find interesting, and talk about them in a way that will be beneficial to their social currency. Berger and Schwartz characterize this as online behavior—in digital settings, consumers are more aware of being watched by peers and, therefore, are motivated to post about brands that will be well-received by others. They call this "motivated transmission." (Klout score, anyone?) And yes, the study has a methodology for identifying "interesting" products.
They claim behavior in face-to-face settings is different: It's less about motivated transmission and more about what products are top-of-mind at a given point in time. Interesting products may generate immediate discussion as novelty items, but that fades fast. Simply being interesting doesn't give a product conversation staying power.
The good news for marketers is that the magic of word-of-mouth isn't limited to certain product categories. Under the right circumstances, common products can generate far more consumer discussion.
It's All About Accessibility
The study finds that the biggest driver of discussion is the accessibility of a product. People naturally talk about what they see and what's top-of-mind. The drink in your hand, the package on the table and the makeup on your face may not be as interesting as a shiny new tech device, but they are discussed far more frequently.
The study finds that the biggest driver of discussion is the accessibility of a product. People naturally talk about what they see and what's top-of-mind. The drink in your hand, the package on the table and the makeup on your face may not be as interesting as a shiny new tech device, but they are discussed far more frequently.
Woody Allen was on to something when he said 80% of success is just showing up. The challenge for marketers is to get their products where they can be seen in a natural conversational context or to create visual cues that stimulate discussions.
Connect With Consumers Through Samples
People can't say much about your product if they haven't used it. The study found that product samples generated the greatest increase in discussion. Not because consumers felt a need for reciprocity, but because they must have first-hand experience with the product to understand what it can do.
People can't say much about your product if they haven't used it. The study found that product samples generated the greatest increase in discussion. Not because consumers felt a need for reciprocity, but because they must have first-hand experience with the product to understand what it can do.
It takes more than a simple handout at the train station or a trial-size tube in an envelope. You have to connect with people and make the brand come alive with ideas for activities and suggestions for using the product in more creative ways. In its latest shopper-marketing report, the Grocery Marketing Association referred to this as winning both hearts and carts. Coupons and rebates may lead to a product experience, but they are focused on the cart and are a complement, not a substitute, for a sample.
Your Marketing Can Provide Valuable Cues
Through various cues and triggers, marketers can make products more accessible. Branded items such as stickers, hats and T-shirts expose brand messages in natural conversation. While not critical to a social-marketing campaign, they can help. The study associated using branded giveaways in campaigns with a 15% increase in word-of-mouth.
Through various cues and triggers, marketers can make products more accessible. Branded items such as stickers, hats and T-shirts expose brand messages in natural conversation. While not critical to a social-marketing campaign, they can help. The study associated using branded giveaways in campaigns with a 15% increase in word-of-mouth.
Marketers can also create links that associate common things with their product, especially if the stimuli or usage situation is one that people do not already connect to the brand. Two examples cited in the study are the cues that ducks provide for Aflac, and the cues that the orange color of Halloween provides for Reese's candy. The report also cites a BzzAgent program for Boston Market that helped create a new association for the brand. The restaurant chain, usually associated for many people with lunch, worked with BzzAgent to target specific customer profiles with dinner-related messaging and offers that boosted word-of-mouth by 20%. Countering consumer expectations can be a powerful tool for getting consumers to talk about a brand.
Buzz Can Be for Everyone
Consumer discussion about products isn't a matter of chance. It happens every day to almost every type of product. The good news is that marketers can impact how often, and for how long, their products are the focus of conversation. Go ahead—your customers are waiting for their cue.
Consumer discussion about products isn't a matter of chance. It happens every day to almost every type of product. The good news is that marketers can impact how often, and for how long, their products are the focus of conversation. Go ahead—your customers are waiting for their cue.
Thursday 1 December 2011
Walk of Faith: Glass Pavement for Tourists Built on 4,690ft Mountain in China
Unbelievable! The mountain is very popular with tourists and is located in the Tianmen Mountain National Forest Park, five miles south of Zhangjiajie Village in the Hunan province.
'Harry Potter' park to Universal Studios H'wood Wizarding World comes to West Coast after Florida success
Hollywood is getting its own version of "The Wizarding World of Harry Potter." Universal Studios and Warner Bros. have agreed to pony up around $200 million to build a second version of the theme-park attraction that opened June 18, 2010, at Islands of Adventure in Orlando.
The themed area has turned into a top draw not only for U but the Orlando area, with tourists flocking to Islands of Adventure, boosting ticket and merchandise sales. NBCUniversal now wants its Hollywood park to benefit from a similar attraction just as Disneyland is about to open "Cars Land" next summer.
Because of "Wizarding World's" instant success, the first question was when Universal would expand the park in Florida, given the amount of land the company owns there. The attraction features replicas of Hogwarts Castle and Hogsmeade village as seen in the films and includes rides like "Flight of the Hippogriff" and "Dragon Challenge." Instead, U and WB chose to build a second "Wizarding World" in Hollywood.
http://www.variety.com/article/VR1118046845?refCatId=13
Nokia Lumia Live event in London with deadmau5
Nokia created this free light show projected onto London's Millbank Tower, on Monday to promote the launch of its Lumia 800 with Windows phone.
Each of the 120m high building's 800 windows were covered with vinyl as 16 projectors beamed 3D images onto the structure. Huge butterflies flew across the London skyline and the tower was twisted, pulsated and even fell down. The show was accompanied by music from producer deadmau5, who created exclusive remixes for the performance.
http://creativity-online.com/work/nokia-uk-nokia-lumia-live/25409
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