Drew B's take on tech PR

Crowdsourcing my life

Someone I work with called James Easterbrook, a smart agency guy at MyAgency (at 33 Digital we work alongside MyAgency on some of our clients), recently did an experiment where he lived his life by the book for a month. He found some surprising results in the process too. He turned it into a column and everything. ["Man Tries to Obey Every Government Guideline for a Month" - Wired, June 2010]

Shortly after he did it, someone asked me: "Has anyone ever lived their life for a day/week/month asking their social network to make every decision for them?" I pointed to James' column as the closest thing I could think of aside from a couple of experiments I did in the last year where I used Twitter and Facebook instead of search engines for a week. 

So I thought I would give it a go... at some stage in the next week (arbitrarily I've decided that stage to be when I reach 6,000 followers on Twitter), I'm going to start asking Twitter and Facebook whenever I need to make a decision. 

If you want to join in the game, wish me luck, and follow me here or here. 

[why am I doing this? My job is helping companies understand how social media affects their business, and we always have to try stuff out. Maybe this is a try too far :{  ]

 

Innovation happens in increments: How Hits Work, from @bankervision

The blogger BankerVision, James Gardener, has posted an in-depth piece on how he thinks innovation happens, and how things become big hits. 

His view, which I totally back up, is that innovation of the sort where something grips everyone, where something becomes the new big thing that everyone must have / do / buy, this happens through incremental improvements to existing things. 

Whenever I have to explain what the new must-have technology, network or online community is, the answer is often an explanation of this theory. 

James' summary is below, and his blog is well worth a read: 

"My key observation is this: breakthrough, radical innovations are never hits. Hits happen when a previous breakthrough is incrementally improved over time, and then shifted sideways into an aligned problem space where they cause a revolution. In all the cases I've been able to find so far, this seems to be true."

How to do advertising for a social media audience: Old Spice facts

A large amount of ad spend went into the current line of Old Spice adverts. The campaign includes a Superbowl TV ad. Not exactly cheap. 

But this week saw the ad campaign do something different and win over a social media audience that included Twitter, 4Chan and YouTube swarms. The ad people recorded scores of live video ads and put them all live over a period of one day, hitting a massive global audience through the social media buzz created. In case you missed how they put it together, courtesy of ReadWriteWeb: 

"A team of creatives, tech geeks, marketers and writers gathered in an undisclosed location in Portland, Oregon yesterday and produced 87 short comedic YouTube videos about Old Spice. In real time. 

"They leveraged Twitter, Facebook, Reddit and blogs. They dared to touch the wild beasts of 4chan and they lived to tell the tale. Even 4chan loved it. Everybody loved it; those videos and 74 more made so far today have now been viewed more than 4 million times and counting. The team worked for 11 hours yesterday to make 87 short videos, that's just over 7 minutes per video, not accounting for any breaks taken. Then they woke up this morning and they are still making more videos right now."

I love the different approach, and how an advert can be made into a story, something that fits in with communities online, and live to tell the tale. I like. Full story is here.