Don't pass out near magic markers

You know you’ve already had a conversation that starts like this …  but is your friend really to blame?  You saw the camera last night, you know everything ends up on Facebook, but still you pose to be papped doing body shots with Cowgirl Crystal, who really didn’t look like a man at the time!   

The morning after feels bad enough without the dread of what will appear on Facebook .  Remember,  friends are your friends until they have a Facebook worthy (i.e hideously awful, embarrassing  and sometimes incriminating) photo taken of you from a very wrong angle.

Play safe … check your Facebook privacy settings .

At Gorilla we’ve embraced the New Year with an attitude of optimism and excitement. We have some fantastic projects lined up, and have literally hit the ground running. Certain members of the Gorilla team have thrown themselves into their work and are committed to making 2010 an incredibly prosperous and successful year.

Sadly certain members of the team don’t seem to be as motivated, and without pointing any fingers, probably need to reevaluate their work ethic…

May I introduce you to Aleksandr Orlov

I have a question for you today… “How do you make an interesting, involving and innovative price comparison website Ad campaign?”  The answer … “It’s obvious, enlist the help of a Russian meerkat named Aleksandr!” 

Aleksandr Orlov the Russian meerkat has become a media phenomenon.   He entertains over 660’00 friends on Facebook, and 31’000 Twitter followers from his stately home in Moscow and still has time to run his very popular meerkat dating website comparethemeerkat.com.  He is even frantically publicising his first Hollywood film The Journey of Courageousness.  This film, as Orlov said in his recent interview with The Telegraph, is “the best 60-second independent meerkat adventure film of all time” and it is “a claw-biting edge-of-seat thrill-ride”. His popularity is apparent,  ring tones and posters are available to download, you can also pop in to Harrods and pick up your very own cuddly Aleksandr.  Meerkat craze has become so frenzied that Harrods couldn’t possibly meet the demand; instead, they have decided to donate all of their cuddly meerkats to a selection of Children’s Charities. 

Aleksandr Orlov and his ITkat, Sergei

Aleksandr was created for an advert for comparethemarket.com, a pretty boring car insurance price comparison website, in which he voices his frustration about people who get his website, comparethemeerkat.com, confused with comparethemarket.com.  From this campaign Aleksandr has become much more than an animated character, he has become a celebrity personality!  The witty comments he posts on Twitter and Facebook, along with his fun website, make Aleksandr very real for a lot of people.  I think this may be to do with the fact he is cute and witty, and he certainly has the novelty factor.  I often hear people reciting his catchphrase “Shimples … meep”.  There is definitely something interesting about bringing characters to life, especially as it has all been created in the name of Advertising.  A lot of effort has been made to create this lovable character and he certainly brings a bit of colour to an otherwise bland, two-a-penny car insurance website.

If you have any articles or opinions you think will add value to this blog, please post them in the comments section below.

1. Social Media as a catch all phrase is so last year.

Just as things start off simple and grow progressively complex, the term social media, which initially applied to anyone, anywhere online, talking with a group of like minded people, now refers to a dynamic so broad as to be almost meaningless. And terms that broad can be dangerous, because more often than not, what we’re talking about when using it isn’t necessarily the same thing you’re thinking about when you hear it. We need 82 words for snow, rather than 1 word for love. Yeah, that old chestnut.

2. Social Marketers need to cash the cheques their mouths are writing.

Return on investment, measurable metrics and quantifiable results are the gatekeepers that will unlock the money everyone craves, even if they tell whoever will listen that digital is all about guerilla tactics on a shoestring budget. It’s not. Well it is, cos without the right attitude and personality you shouldn’t even bother. You can do a lot more with a lot less online than in traditional media creating sustained, engaging activities through digital channels that really count for something requires decent funding 15000 of your 80 million budget won’t get respectable results. And no-one in this day and age parts with significant sums unless you’re doing a good job of conning them or you can quantifiably show them that you can take them from A (Audience) to P (Profits). Make sure you can not only produce the results but prove you produced them.

3. The Bleeding Edge has moved, again.

While it’s imperative that brands are part of the standard media platforms, or risk being left out of the conversation altogether, pitching a Facebook, Youtube, Twitter account and a UGC contest is no longer bleeding edge. Or even edge, for that matter. That stuff is now part of the norm, and expected. on that note, having an account doesn’t make you part of the sphere anymore than owning a throwing star makes you a ninja.

4. Flail and you’re fucked

Inaction is death. Real time means no reporting to a higher authority and waiting for a directive. And real time isn’t just coming. it’s here, already, as we speak. If you’re not on the ball, you’ll miss the bus, to mix metaphors. The upside of this is that when something goes wrong and the air is buzzing with people talking about how utterly demonically evil or moronically incompetent a brand is, every passing second that a brand isn’t out there repairing the damage or at least consoling the bereaved is a second that 10 other people are retweeting, sharing and liking comments. Word spreads exponentially online. Like VD in the ’60s.

5. More than just a phone, really.

Mobile has shown ridiculously fast growth in the last few years, and this is gonna continue. As the technology moves down the economic pipeline and cheaper handsets get ramped up, the software follows suit. IE everyone will shortly have access to everything, all the time. Location based social media is taking off, payment via mobile gets more entrenched every day and everything else follows suit. Basically, online becomes fully entrenched on your phone, and where you are digitally becomes immersed into where you are physically. Digital Natives are taking one step closer to being fully integrated to the web 24/7.

6. Integrate for your own sake and theirs

Integration of platform messages isn’t just about sending out a coherent communication. It’s also about allowing segmented parts of your audience engage with each other as simply as possible. Beyond that, it’s also a time and labour saver. By sending out a request for suggestions for this article on Tweetdeck, one messagewas received by groups on Facebook, multiple twitter accounts and Linkedin in one shot. Imagine the effectiveness of integrating all of the channels you use so comments in one spark debate and conversation on another.

That’s our feeling. Here are a few other articles we think have valid input (there was a lot more but these tend not to overlap).

Online Reputation Management Trends for 2010 by Brandseye. Useful insights into what we’re all going to be doing and or stressing about. Some good insights.
10 trends for a world in flux by Dion Chang. A well respected trend forecaster. Some stuff sounds surprisingly obvious some have a revelatory feel. But it’s always nice thinking you’re keeping up with the big dogs.
2010 Marketing Predictions by Matt Granfield. Never heard of this guy before, but after reading his stuff, his humour, tell it like it is tone and insight make for entertaining and informative reading.
TrendsSpotting’s 2010 Social Media Influencers – Trend Predictions in 140 Characters. A 37 page slideshow on Slideshare with bigwigs making their prediction in 160 characters or less. Perfect for the knowledge skimming culture of today.
10 Web Trends to Watch in 2010. Pete Cashmore, founder of the hella cool site Mashable, makes his predictions.
Trendhunter’s 2010 Trend report. 300 trends predicted for the next 12 months. Download the 22 page sample and if you like it, buy the full size version.

CANON Commercial – Freeze Tag from Saman Keshavarz on Vimeo.

An all out game of war using Canon cameras. CANON Cameras were handed out to various people and many of their shots made it in the commercial.

Music:

Huddle Formation by The GO! Team

Product: Canon Digital Cameras

Director: Saman Keshavarz

Producers: Romson Niega, Tom Lee

Associate Producers: Francis Pollara, Nate Eggert

Cinematographer: Don Burton

Editor: Nate Tam

Production Design: Julie Chen

Sound Editor: Dan Bartolucci

Titles: Andrew Johnson

Visual Effects: John Carey

Colorist: Santiago Padilla

© 2009

myspace.com/saman_keshavarz

samankeshavarz.blogspot.com

For nine hours these eight interdisciplinary thinkers dreamed up innovative, quirky, and brilliant answers to questions posed to them by passers-by.  No problem was out of bounds, and a solution was pitched within twenty minutes.  The aim of the day was to give an awesome demonstration of what can be achieved when you apply creativity to life’s little conundrums.  It is pretty amazing what can be achieved when you think outside the box … whilst literally sitting in a box!

The variety of questions was wide ranging; from the personal, “How can I convince my husband to take a vacation despite the economy”, to the social, “How can we make smokers responsible smokers?” From the philanthropic “How can I hand out 300 tents to homeless people and have the city accept it?” to the zany, “How can I dress up my wheelchair to look like a rollercoaster for Halloween?”  The answers and solutions that the Zulu Alpha Kilo team came up with were brilliant and all the questioners went away astounded.

‘Thinking inside the Box’ was cool on so many levels; the box was visually impressive, a stunning publicity stunt (I immediately checked out their website), it was attention-grabbing, memorable, innovative, quirky, and such a powerful way to open peoples eyes to the possibilities that can be achieved with a little creative thinking.  The agency name, Zulu Alpha Kilo, was inspired by the phonetic alphabet, which is used to ensure universal clarity what ever language you speak.  Their choice of name is indicative to their belief that “your message has to be simple and evocative to have the slightest chance of being decoded by today’s media-saturated consumer”.  There is nothing much clearer than a big white box emblazoned “THINK” to bring a little creativity in to our lives …

RESPECT

Not too long ago, whilst checking out the Lynx Australia Party across the Internet campaign, I noticed that Lynx has a Facebook page.  Not unusual nowadays; Gorilla’s on Facebook, Redbull and Quiksilver are on Facebook, even my local Sainsbury’s (a Supermarket in the UK) is joining the party.  But what does having a Facebook (or any other social network) presence give a company or organisation?  The answer … we can BIG them up!

For those of those of you who worship at the shrine of marketing guru Seth Godin, you would have read his Blog the other month ‘Launching Brands in Public’.  He has come up with the idea of collecting comments consumers have posted on Facebook, Youtube, Twitter etc and presenting them in one web page so that a company can directly respond (for a price of course).  In my humble opinion, these company forum pages feel like damage control, a way for companies to control any potential web-based negative publicity. But not all consumer/customer remarks are necessarily negative…

Social networking sites have quickly become perfect playgrounds for companies to boast their presence in our lives and also their credibility, as let’s face it, who isn’t on Facebook?  The best thing about it though is that these pages, open for the whole world to see, are free and fantastic endorsements of how great a product, brand or company is. Lynx Oz, for example, sent X-number of guys free Lynx products to promote their new shower gels. These happy customers then bigged them up on Facebook and encouraged us all to get hooked up by Lynx.  Free stuff, a personal recommendation and a cool FB site, I’m a girl and Lynx is looking pretty cool to me.  Also, I just quickly checked out the Quiksilver FB page, and was enthusiastically told by Eduardö Brachö that “Quiksilver are the best, top 1”.  I don’t know who Eduardö Brachö is but he likes Quiksilver!  RedBull are biggin’ themselves up on Facebook and getting respect from all their fans (and me … check out their Pitstop in Times Square!) 

These kind of cool web pages are awesome ways for companies to stay in touch with their customers/ consumers/ fans and promote their brand. I think though, at the end the day … who just doesn’t want some free biggin’ up?